I noticed that Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates was mentioned as a possible source for the fascinating TV show Mad Men and then I saw that a friend of mine was reading it for a book club, so I got it. It was a fascinating read about a couple that probably shouldn’t have been married with kids, two selfish people who thought thy were better than the lives that they were leading. Of course the only possible result is tragedy. Apparently it was ahead of its time for its portrait of quite desperation in the suburbs as well as for its frank language and adult situations. All in all it is a compelling look at the cultural impasse that took place in the transition from the 50s to the 60s. I can see that some plot points were recycled for Mad Men as well as some of the period details: drinking and smoking, poor parenting, etc… It was a compelling story and a page-turner at that.
BONUS: James Woods re-evaluates Richard Yates' modern classic online for The New Yorker:
“Revolutionary Road” is a brilliant rewriting of “Madame Bovary,” with one signal difference—at the end of Flaubert’s novel, both Emma and Charles Bovary lose, because she commits suicide and her dull husband is utterly bereft. In Yates’s savage inversion, the wife loses but the dull husband secretly wins: though deprived of wife and children, he prospers at work, and finally secures for himself the safe, settled world that his wife died trying to dislodge. In “Revolutionary Road,” mid-century American suburban man is so maddening because he is both a rank escapist and a conservative pragmatist: he has arrogated to himself twin rights that ought to be incompatible—to dream of escape (and have adulterous affairs, like Emma Bovary), while simultaneously dreaming of timid stability, like Charles Bovary.
Yates’s novel is—in just this Flaubertian manner—both traditional and radical. Its traditionalism can be felt in the way it flourishes the artisanal virtues of structure and finish. The prose is beautifully alert and poised: “his thin mouth already moving in the curly shape of wit, as if he were rolling a small, bitter lozenge on his tongue.” The book’s form is a solid delight of symmetry and repetition. Just as April’s first pregnancy scuppered the original European escape (but didn’t really, because Frank never intended to go), so her third scuppers the later one (but doesn’t really, either, for the same reason). Frank’s father also worked at Knox. A play opens the novel, and a performance ends it, as the Wheelers’ neighbors, the Campbells, tell the new owners of the Wheelers’ house about the tragedy that has vacated the property. In the very last pages, Mrs. Givings, the appallingly eager real-estate agent who had sold the Wheelers their house, describes, to her husband, the new owners in the same language she once used to describe the Wheelers: “She’s very sweet and fun to talk to; he’s rather reserved. I think he must do something very brilliant in town.” Frank’s children, now motherless, will have the kind of parentless existence with their uncle that April Wheeler had as a child, and which, her husband felt, damaged her. So the horror begins all over again: these repetitions and circularities overlap to make the novel’s heavy plait of determinism.
Above all, the novel is nimbly prismatic. It seems to offer a familiar critique of the suburbs, of the kind we know from movies and books like “American Beauty” and “The Ice Storm,” in which the streets are amok with hysterical housewives and angry soft men. Yates himself said that he intended the novel to function as “an indictment of American life in the nineteen-fifties”...
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