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"4.5 stars

“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.��

Richard Yates takes a well-honed surgeon’s blade, painstakingly dissects a marriage, examines its tortuous viscera, and leaves it fully exposed for all to observe. The reader becomes a surgical assistant of sorts, a witness to the searing scrutiny of all that has been laid bare. As increasingly squeamish as I became, I was still held captive by the spectacle. The more I realized what Yates had accomplished, the more weak in the knees I became, the more impressed by his genius.

The attractive and promising young couple, Frank and April Wheeler, and their two children are the perfect image of a suburban family. You can almost see them standing there in front of the proper white house with the big picture window and the neatly manicured lawn. The illusion is burst, however, right from the start. We know it’s going to disintegrate when Yates draws an analogy by use of an amateur play that turns into a flop. April, once an aspiring actress, is at the center of the stage and Frank the adoring husband in the audience. The play begins on a high note and quickly goes downhill from there. By the end of the evening, both cast and audience depart with an air of humiliation.

“�� time and again they read the promise of failure in each other’s eyes, in the apologetic nods and smiles of their parting and the spastic haste with which they broke for their cars and drove home to whatever older, less explicit promises of failure might lie in wait for them there.��

As things spiral downward and Frank and April’s marriage takes a turn for the worst, April steps in with a grand plan to move to Paris and begin a new life there. They know they don’t belong in the suburbs, Frank doesn’t deserve a tedious job at the company where his own father once worked, and April has her own lofty ambitions. They are a couple marked for success. Or are they? The marriage suddenly seems to be on the right path once again. They are hopeful for the transformative dream they plan to realize by the end of summer.

"Never before had elation welled more powerfully inside him; never had beauty grown more purely out of truth; never in taking his wife had he triumphed more completely over time and space. The past could dissolve at his will and so could the future; so could the walls of this house and the whole imprisoning wasteland beyond it, towns and trees. He had taken command of the universe because he was a man, and because the marvelous creature who opened and moved for him, tender and strong, was a woman."

Yates not only gets inside his characters and reveals their most private ruminations (many of them quite arrogant, self-serving, and callous), he also writes some of the most convincing dialogue between couples and among friends and acquaintances that I have ever read. No doubt he was either an active participant or a keen observer of more than one marital altercation that had escalated to a feverish pitch! There’s really not a single likeable character in the entire novel. I think this was done with purpose. Richard Yates wanted to expose not just his central characters, but also the superficiality of the entire lot.

If there is one person with whom one could align, it would have to be the son of the Wheeler’s real estate agent. John Givings has been institutionalized following a breakdown, much to the embarrassment of Mrs. Givings who has her own image to uphold as real estate agent for this perfect suburban neighborhood. When her grand plan to introduce him to the Wheelers as a form of ‘therapy�� is put in motion, we realize that John is the mouthpiece for all that has gone wrong in this grand illusion of Revolutionary Road. He says what everyone wants to say, but won’t as a matter of propriety. He, more than anyone else, points out what has gone wrong with the American dream. With no filter whatsoever, John blurts out one brazen opinion after another. But even these truisms have a ring of sarcasm to them. We may not like this young man either, but he sure as hell offers a refreshing honesty that no one else seems to have.

“�� maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that’s when there’s nothing to do but take off. If you can.��

Revolutionary Road was written in 1961 and portrays the life of a 1950s young suburbanite couple, but it could really take place at any time. The fantasy and dissolution of the American dream is astutely sketched. Yates explores the illusion of marriage as a way out of a less than ideal childhood, as a way to achieve your independence and aspirations, and as an institution to be upheld no matter what the consequences. He places these fictions under the microscope and then dismantles them. This is a book that will make you uncomfortable; I squirmed throughout. However, I believe this is Yates’s intent, and he fully succeeded in achieving his goal. I couldn’t help comparing this book to John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, which I finished just a day before starting this one. Both are scathing portraits of marriages gone wrong, but Updike left me a bit of hope for Rabbit, that aggravating bastard! Frank Wheeler can take a hike and never come back for all I care.

“It depressed him to consider how much energy he had wasted, over the years, in the self-denying posture of apology. From now on, whatever else his life might hold, there would be no more apologies.��
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