Revolutionary Road

The Americans may have perfected the art of white-picket-pence suburban living, but behind the manicured lawns and swept porches lurk dissatisfied, bitter, defeated people for whom the idealistic dreams of youth have stultified.

This is, of course, rich territory for the novelist, to which not a few of the giants of American literature have been drawn (Philip Roth, Richard Ford, John Cheever to name a few). And while it is obvious to say that there are suburbs scattered across the vastness of the United States, it is in the tree-lined, quiet towns in the states of New Jersey and New York that these authors set their dramas of disintegrating suburban lives.

Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road was published in 1961; it was his first novel and is generally regarded as his best. Although probably lesser known (in the UK) than the works of Ford and Roth today, the book nevertheless had a huge impact on many of these writers (as Ford himself writes in his introduction to this edition, its precise and seemingly casual dissection of a marriage in crisis continues to impress.

Essentially, the book is about the tedious but charged lives of young couple Frank and April Wheeler. Frank commutes by train to his mind-numbingly dull job in the city, leaving April to look after their children; at the weekend, they meet up with their friends and drink too much. April takes the lead in an amateur production of a play, but in the aftermath of the performance going humiliatingly wrong, April suggests a plan that will take the family away from the boredom of suburban life.

Yates brilliantly dissects the subsequent battle of wills between the couple: Frank takes what he considers to be an existential, wry approach to his boring job, and therefore has no choice but to acquiesce to April’s grand idea. Secretly, however, he suffers from a distinct failure of nerve and does all he can to make himself feel better as a man while trying to manipulate April into changing her mind. Bitter and bruising arguments are followed by unsteady rapprochements, but the ending to their story is tragic.

Yates periodically gives us a break from the Wheelers to analyse the lives of some of their suburban acquaintances, but his focus on the frailties of these folk is similarly sharp; here too are tragic stories, leavened with black humour.

Revolutionary Road’s 1950s setting gives the book its context, but the timeless and universal faultlines that develop in the Wheelers’ relationship are as relevant today. In this way, Yates’ masterpiece is a microcosm of shattered dreams and wrong decisions optimistically taken.