Desperation Street

"The happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture."

You may have guessed it from the times I quoted this book last week, but I'm just going to open with it now: Richard Yates' REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is one of the best books I've read this year. It's been on my to-read list forever and I actually returned it unread to the library earlier this year because I couldn't renew it, but I am so glad I went back to read it.

Frank and April Wheeler are a pair of what appear to be cookie-cuter 1950s suburbanites -- educated, 2 kids, he works and she stays at home (although she has worked in the past). Neither of them are particularly happy: He works for a company he applied to because it had once rejected his father, trying to do as little as possible and missing his old post-war bohemian life when he was an erudite, handsome college man.

April keenly senses that Frank is unhappy -- they were living in the city when she got pregnant, "seven years too soon," which forced his hand in a sense -- but doesn't really know how to help. She feels like she doesn't truly love her kids and misses the days when she once dreamed of being in actress. In fact, the book opens with April performing in a play through the community theatre which the Wheelers and their friends the Campbells started, which just embarrasses them all. When April hits upon a plan that would allow them to leave their house on Revolutionary Road, she thinks it'll solve everything about their life:

"You could have called my bluff in a minute...but you didn't. You were too good and young and scared; you played right along with it, and that's how the whole thing started. That's how we both got committed to this enormous delusion -- because that's what it is, an enormous, obscene delusion -- this idea that people have to resign from real life and 'settle down' when they have families. It's the great sentimental lie of the suburbs, and I've been making you subscribe to it all this time. I've been making you live by it! My God, I've even gone as far as to work up this completely corny, soap-opera picture of myself... Now do you see what you have to forgive me for? And why we have to get out of here and over to Europe as fast as we possibly can?"

But Frank proves curiously opposed to the idea, even as outwardly he conforms to his wife's plans. The author also discusses how the neighbors are affected by the Wheelers' plan, from their best friends whom they secretly can't stand to the nosy empty nester next door.

There's something that feels very epic about Yates' book. Despite the specificity he gives the characters, Frank and April -- perhaps with the passage of time between this book's publication and now -- feel very much like a 50s Everycouple in the way we have come to see that decade. e suffers the slings and arrows of no longer being in the war by drinking too much; she could be sexually repressed and feels like an inadequate mother. (If you've seen "Mad Men," you're probably thinking of the Drapers, and the comparison is apt.)

But since REVOLUTIONARY ROAD comes from that era, it's a more nuanced take on the fifties than later portrayals which hammer their points home. For example, the nosy empty-nester is in a long-standing disagreement with her husband because she likes to work and he doesn't:

"And [Mrs. Givings] had never been able to explain or even to understand that what she loved was not the job -- it could have been any job -- or even the independence it gave her (though of course that was important for a woman constantly veering toward the brink of divorce). Deep down, what she'd loved and needed was the work itself."

By the same token, even minor characters get wonderfully sketched out moments, as in this one, where Frank is watching a woman on the street with whom he has just had a confrontation of sorts:

"[H]e crept back to the front door, pushed aside the dusty net curtain that covered its glass and peered down, just in time for a rear view of Norma out on the curb, wagging her handbag for a taxi. Her back was stiff with anger and there was something extremely pathetic about her suitcase, which looked expensive and brand-new. She had probably spent days buying it and weeks shopping for the things that would ride in its silken depths today -- new bathing suits, slacks, sun lotion, a new camera -- all the fussy, careful apparatus of a girlish good time. With the odd whimpering sounds still bubbling up from his rib cage he felt an incongruous wave of tenderness go out to her, as she climbed into the cab and rolled away."

As you can tell, this book gave me a feeling I haven't had for a long while where I felt compelled to copy down passage after passage because they were so exquisitely rendered. I heartily recommend this book, and suggest you read it now before the forthcoming film adaptation, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio ("Titanic" reunion!), makes quick work of its subtlety.