Revolutionary Road

Good thing the movie came out or I might never have read this dark and brilliant, 1961 novel by Richard Yates, about a couple whose lives derail amid the 1950’s suburbs. The book takes a wry, satirical look at the conformity of the times and the American dream, and reminded me a bit of the same disillusioned 1950s of J.D. Salinger’s books or perhaps Sylvia Plath’s.

It involves Frank and April Wheeler trying to stay above “the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs.” And yet they’re caught amid the “hopeless, emptiness” of it, wherein Frank works at a job he hates at “Knox Business Machines” and April takes care of the kids and their house at the end of Revolutionary Road.

But then, April hatches a plan to move the family in the fall to Paris, where she can work and Frank can find out what he really wants to do. And for a while the plan (deemed by colleagues and neighbors as selfish and unrealistic) causes a time of “such joyous derangement, such exultant carelessness that Frank Wheeler could never afterwards remember how long it lasted.” In the end though, events conspire, the Wheelers change their minds, and the plan and everything comes crashing down.

It’s a bleak ending of a couple on the brink. With an honest mirror on American middle-class suburbia, the book stands the test of time, and its characters and descriptions seem amusingly on target. There are the annoying neighbors, Shep and Milly Campbell; Frank’s mistress from work, Maureen Gruber; the busybody real estate agent Mrs. Givings; and her son John, who’s in a mental institution despite seeming to be the only one to speak the truth. But the best characters are Frank and April Wheeler, whose portraits are both troubling and at times darkly humorous.

“Listen a minute. I won’t touch you. I just want to say I’m sorry.”

“That’s wonderful. Now will you please leave me alone?”