Sparrows

This one time, I read a Richard Yates novel and was surprised how depressing it was. I must be really off my game right now.

I had set a goal a few years ago to read all of Yates after loving REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (a dysfunctional relationship, perhaps) and my plan is to drop one of his novels onto my library request list every so often when I'm not using one of my precious 15 holds. I didn't know anything more about it when I picked up my library paperback than that it was Yates' second novel, not the ideal way to go into it for reasons I think will be clear.

First of our surprises: this is primarily a war novel, following young Robert Prentice who turns 18 and enlists at the tail end of World War II. Feeling mediocre in all things, Robert goes to war with dreams of a tight bond with his fellow soldiers and the noble sacrifice of battle, only to get bogged down in the dirt (literal and metaphorical) of the Army's engagement abroad. He discovers that he's not really good at the day-to-day work of being a soldier at the inopportune moment of landing in Europe, and then he's really stuck

Intercut with the parade of humiliations that is Robert's service, the indomitable spirit of his mother, Alice, looks like a pie-eyed view of the world, then an outright rejection of any of its truths. Alice divorced Robert's father when he was very young because she felt that he was stifling her artistic career (first a graphic designer, then a sculptor). Her belief that she can support the family on her art if she just gets that one big break leads her to fall deeper and deeper into debt as she moves around the New York City suburbs trying to find the right place to be "inspired." This conviction is similar to April Wheeler's in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, but April has no power and Alice has wrested it for herself.

Because of their early struggles, Robert and Alice are really too close as mother and son, and the war hurridly creates for them the boundaries they should have had all along. In a way, Robert drinks from the same well of potential hope as his mother, just thousands of miles away. Alice is steadfast in her belief that she's just a "one man show" away from making it, well into middle age, but Robert envisions war heroics as an eraser ridding himself of the shame of growing up poor and picked on; he just finds out right away that it's not going to be like that. Yates loves this topic (earlier this year I read his story "The Canal," treading similar territory); of course, Frank Wheeler was also a World War II vet. The brutality of the humiliation in A SPECIAL PROVIDENCE, though, is arguably worse than the actual acts of war themselves, and it never seems to let up on Robert.

If you've recently read REVOLUTIONARY ROAD I think you'll find this a satisfying deep cut, with a very odd jag into Westchester County society in the 1930s. Zadie Smith compared it to BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S mixed with ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, and damn, don't I wish I had thought of that first.

Indie bookstore hopping: Washington D.C.

This past weekend I went to Washington D.C.'s famous independent bookstore Politics and Prose for the first time. Several visits later my grasp on D.C. geography is still not stellar, so I can only place P&P in a neighborhood called "not near the monuments and close to the Maryland border without going over" -- but its reputation so precedes it that you can probably just ask for directions by name. 

P&P has been in the news lately because its owners put it up for sale last year, but happily it was recently purchased by the ghostwriter of Hillary Clinton's LIVING HISTORY and her husband. The store doesn't specialize in reads for policy wonks, but instead offers the full range of fiction and nonfiction, including handsome shelves of local bestsellers in the front window and tables of recent paperback fiction in a side room. I appreciated the table of authors who had appeared on "This American Life" (including signed copies of Sarah Vowell's latest, UNFAMILIAR FISHES); that's a clever idea.

The basement holds a coffeehouse, the children's books (including a nook with a beanbag perfect for hiding out and reading -- check under the stairs!) and a fairly good bargain section, although there aren't any crazy deals. If you like audiobooks and biographies/memoirs, you'll probably be most pleased at it. I ended up walking away with a used copy of A TRAGIC HONESTY: THE LIFE AND WORK OF RICHARD YATES myself. There was a panel going on about the new Smithsonian jazz anthology, but it was too sunny for us to linger and eavesdrop. 

Photo: notbrucelee

Once more unto the beach, dear friends, once more

It is the end of summer as we commonly recognize it in this part of the world, so also the end of this year's summer reading. I did much better than last year, but I still didn't finish the list. (EDGAR SAWTELLE, I am so sorry.) But I did a lot of reading overall, and then there's INFINITE JEST, which is not finished yet.

The last book I read was Richard Yates' COLD SPRING HARBOR, and I've been struggling with what to write about it. I loved REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and expected to flip similarly over this book, but Internet, I did not. Yates' last novel, concerning two families united by marriage on Long Island, felt unfinished in that it set up several conflicts and did nothing with them; the most vivid character is a divorcée who is practically a grotesque and described as "dying for love," but even her storyline does not get any kind of resolution. It was a slice of life, but not a flavorful one. I'll still give more Yates a chance, though; I would like to eventually have read all of his books (including the collection of short stories I bought earlier this year).

Got any great reading memories to share from this summer? I remember a particularly cloudless day along Lake Michigan, watching my sisters nosing through their Chabon and Sittenfeld paperbacks and imprinting galley ink onto the whitest strip of my sunscreen-covered arm.

"Revolutionary Road" out on DVD today

Fans of Kate, Leo, suburban derangement, soul-searching, or seekers of proof that I don't hate every movie: The book is still better, but I stand by my claim that last year's Sam Mendes effort was probably the best adaptation that could have happened. And it's not as depressing as the trend wrought by this week's other book "adaptation" on DVD, "He's Just Not That Into You," a film I was happy to skip and plan to keep skipping.

If you like REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, you might like THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE which is now out in paperback. I can't find any evidence of a forthcoming adaptation, but I assume we'll see a Weinstein Co. Best Picture nominee in 3 to 5 years. My casting suggestions are a bit spoilery, so I will put them in the comments.

"Revolutionary Road": The hype train stops here

Not sure where this Jay557 is getting all these scenes from the forthcoming Sam Mendes adaptation of "Revolutionary Road," but (no surprise) they are making me even more excited to catch this movie when it comes out Dec. 26.

This is my favorite clip of the most recent ones: Frank and April, the dissatisfied suburban couple, decide to let their neighbors and best friends in on their plan to change their lives, a change that really moves the plot forward.

Screenings are already taking place in Manhattan; maybe my invite from Paramount and Dreamworks got lost in the mail. Thanks to Superfast Reader for pointing these out.

Earlier cars on the hype train: Official "Revolutionary Road" trailer, and my review of the Richard Yates novel that started it all.

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.

"I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans... It's a thing I wouldn't wish on anybody. It's the most stupid, ruinous kind of self-deception there is, and it gets you into nothing but trouble."

--Richard Yates, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

"It had been easy to decide in favor of love on Bethune Street, in favor of walking proud and naked on the grass rug of an apartment that caught the morning sun among its makeshift chairs, its French travel posters and its bookcase made of packing-crate slats -- an apartment where half the fun of having an affair was that it was just like being married, and where later, after a trip to City Hall and back, after a ceremonial collecting of the other two keys from the other two men, half the fun of being married was that it was just like having an affair. She'd decided in favor of that, all right. And why not? Wasn't it the first love of any kind she'd ever known? Even on the level of practical advantage it must have held an undeniable appeal: it freed her from the gritty round of disappointment she would otherwise have faced as an only mildly talented, mildly enthusiastic graduate of dramatic school; it let her languish attractively through a part-time office job ('just until my husband finds the kind of work he really wants to do') while saving her best energies for animated discussions of books and pictures and the shortcomings of other people's personalities, for trying new ways of fixing her hair and new kinds of inexpensive clothes ('Do you really like the sandals, or are they too Villagey?') and for hours of unhurried dalliance deep in their double bed. But even in those days she'd held herself poised for immediate flight; she had always been ready to take off the minute she happened to feel like it ('Don't talk to me that way, Frank, or I'm leaving. I mean it') or the minute anything went wrong."

--Richard Yates, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD