I seem to have been doing a lot of reading about disenchanted Americans and broken lives of late, which understandably has had the effect of leaving me rather maudlin. I feel the need to post a blog on the matter if only to cleanse myself of said feelings(!), so here we go ...
First up is Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. You'll remember I reviewed the film and promised I'd get hold of the book - well, I kept my word. I enjoyed it so much I gave a friend a copy for her birthday. Hang on - I say enjoyed, that's not quite the right word given the book is possibly one of the most bitter treatments of relationships I've ever read (don't worry, I didn't just give said friend an utterly miserable tome to see in her birthday). We know the plot so I won't elaborate all over again, as the movie adaptation is pretty loyal to the source material and even lifts entire chunks of speech from the novel. RR is a cauterizing analysis of a failing relationship and everyday life which manages to be both of its time and yet endlessly relevant to today, with strong characters who feel immediately very real. Having read the book after seeing the movie, I was stunned to find how completely Yates' description of Frank could describe Mr DiCaprio:
'He was neat and solid, a few days less than thirty years old, with ... the kind of unemphatic good looks that an advertising photographer might use to portray the discerning consumer of well-made but inexpensive merchandise ... But for all its lack of structural distinction, his face did have an unusual mobility: it was able to suggest wholly different personalities with each flickering change of expression.'
How wonderfully this evokes DiCaprio's own mercurial features; he seems made for the role. He certainly had some great source material to work from, as the novel is told pretty much entirely from Frank's perspective. Where the book differs is in it's presentation of Frank and April, who are depicted as rather more bohemian than in the film, and about whom we're given more insight into their upbringing. Granted a movie can't convey everything a book can, but you'll remember that I felt where the film fell short was in provoking emotions from the audience. The book succeeds in this completely. The last time I felt so drained by a reading experience was after reading Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin, another incredibly depressing but well written book. Yates' style is at once economical and devastatingly astute; his description of Frank's working day will make any office worker cringe. We may not have the martinis at lunch and the typewriters have given way to Dell computers, but whoever works in an office 9-5 surely can't fail to empathise with this passage, in which Frank reflects on the daily grind:
'Over the years he had discovered slight sensory distinctions between it and all the others of the building; it was no more or less pleasant, but different for being 'his' floor. It was his bright, dry, daily ordeal, his personal measure of tedium. It had taught him new ways of spacing out the hours of the day - almost time to go down for coffee; almost time to go out for lunch; almost time to go home - and he had come to rely on the desolate wastes of time that lay between these pleasures as an invalid comes to rely on the certainty of recurring pain. It was part of him'.
Bleak huh? But I bet it strikes a note. My friends and I are all of a similar age to Frank and on discussing the book with those who've read it, have conceded somewhat bashfully that yes, we can all relate to the drudgery of routine and the shock it presents after the relative freedom of university. The struggle to reconcile youthful hopes with adult reality makes it all too easy to ally ourselves with Frank and April. Who can't relate to the desire to escape the hum drum but also the fear of doing just that? And then there's Frank and April's crumbling relationship. The rare sections of the book told from April's perspective offer psychological insight into how conflicting perceptions can spiral out of control, changing our responses to someone we once loved. The quiet ways in which two people who once felt excited by the other can slip into first hatred, then indifference, are powerfully evoked and have a vaguely feminist feel. Frank's immaturity and misguided opinions condemn him whilst we still seek to understand him, and the action April takes are an indictment of the position of women at the time.
How has Yates been ignored for so long?! As the Wheeler's shared dreams give way to resignation with their lot, metaphors of performance dominate the text and illustrate the fantasy of the American Dream. This has been done to death since Yates wrote RR, but at the time it must have been revolutionary (ahem) stuff. Yates offers us a critique of America in the midst of change. The Campbell's, a more blue collar version of the Wheelers, have kids who seem glued to the television in their lounge, a new gadget that was then such a novelty and now the bone of contention for so many, opening and closing worlds at the same time; the political winds are beginning to stir and the notion of the woman's place being in the home would soon fuel the feminist movement. In some ways the book reminds me of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, as the emancipated mood of the 1960s came too late for McEwan's characters just as it does for April, whose character symbolises the tragedy at the book's core (doubly so because she seems the stronger of the couple). Both books capture an unnamed restlessness, personally and socially. I guess throughout the sixties a book like RR felt old-fashioned and irrelevant, with so much in transition. But although Yates has slipped off the literary radar over the last 40 years or so, the themes of relationships and the constraints of adulthood are timeless and the writing is top class.
Other American authors like John Updike seem to have taken up the cause of the flawed and frustrated everyman, but as I will discuss in a future blog, in my opinion he benefited from timing and a more ambitious authorial strategy rather than a fundamentally better way of writing. Do read this book. It won't cheer you up, but it will astound you with its power.
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