Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates

Where do we to to to find authenticity in our lives? Artistic expression; meaningful work; love and marriage; family; children ... And what do we do if what we find there seems little more than cheap artifice or a momentarily shared delusion?

The opening of the novel largely concerns the unsuccessful staging of an amateur production of The Petrified Forest*. The play actually pre-empts much of the storyline of the novel, with dreams of escaping to France and artistic creation clashing against drear mundanity.
The failure of the play seems to be hard for April Wheeler, who starred and had once been a drama student. But there is a shared, communal sense of failure, and a sense that life is about reaching a compromise with your various failures: "time and again they read the promise of failure in each other's eyes, in the apologetic nods and smiles of their parting and the spastic haste with which they broke for their cars and drove home to whatever older, less explicit promises of failure might lie in wait for them there."

This latest failure drives a wedge between April and her husband Frank, irritation soon growing into aggression and lurching towards hatred: "Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each others strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again." It will take time to make up after this fight, long enough for Frank to sleep with a fellow office worker in order to shore up his faltering manhood.

Frank spent time in Europe during World War Two and went to college afterwards, during which time he managed to convince himself how interesting he was. He strikes poses in order to get noticed and when impending fatherhood drives him to find a proper job he deliberately finds one that will not tax him in any way, nor distract him from LIFE. "All I want is enough dough coming in to keep us solvent for the next year or so, till I can figure things out; meanwhile I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I'm most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered "interesting" in its own right. I want something that can't possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen old corporation that's been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for one job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is they're supposed to be doing."  However there is a sense from the start that when he gets to realising what this "identity" is he will be facing the same dillema Mother Hubbard faced when she tried to feed the dog.

The writing about the corporation Frank finds himself in is grimly funny, and also fascinating as archeology of the recent past. Who has "multigraphed" a document? And we also get the early days of the computer revolution, with some things that haven't changed. Here is a description of the demonstration models at the Knox corporation, where Frank works, the same company his Dad Earl had been a salesman for. "Some of them, the simpler ones, were much like the machines that had kindled his father's enthusiasm twenty years before, though the angular black designs of those days had all been modified to fit the globular "sculpted forms" of their new casings, which were the colour of oyster meat; but there were others equipped to deal with the facts of business at speeds more lickety-split than anything Earl Wheeler could have dreamed of. These, ready to purr and blink with electronic mystery, grew more and more imposing across the floor until they culminated in the ig inscrutable components of the Knox "500" Electronic Computer, a machine which, according to the museum card displayed at its base, could "perform the lifetime work of a man with a desk calculator in thirty minutes.""

He was attracted to April because he thought she was the type of "first-rate girl" who was too good for him.  She found him interesting, thinking him indifferent to the usual trappings of success and a non-conformist. They will live interesting lives. But there is an undertow drawing them deeper in to the suburbs, deeper into commuter / housewife conformity, even if their house has a bit more character than their neighbours, even if they rail against being "painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture."

But both Frank and April have poor relationships with their own families and are ambivalent about the fact of having a child. They are happier having "interesting" lives and feel that the compromises they have made have driven them into a life that is untrue to their real selves. In order to escape this apparently inevitable fate April comes up with a plan to move to Paris. She will work and Frank can think. This detente brings the couple back together and they start to pull away from their few friends in their locality. Could this be their own actual Revolutionary Road? "It's like coming out of a Cellophane bag. It's like having been encased in some kind of Cellophane for years without knowing it, and suddenly breaking out."

The other major characters are the Campbells, a couple who they meet up with for drinks and who are also involved in The Petrified Forest. Shep is 'in love' with April. There is also the Givings, an older couple. Mrs Givings is a real estate agent who buries her dissatisfaction in workaholism and as for her husband Howard -  "in retirement it seemed that the years of office tedium had marked him as vividly as old seafaring man are marked by the wind and sun." He escapes from his wife's constant talk by turning down his hearing aid. Their son John has had a number of breakdowns and is in a local asylum. Mrs Givings thinks that the Wheeler's are a couple he might get on with and brings him to visit when taking him on a day out. He has no sense of propriety and speaks his mind, playing the role that The Fool is often said to play for the king who hears nothing else but what people think he wants to hear.

There is a lot more in this book, which works both as a topical and realistic story of the times, much of which remains topical today. It also works as a mythic telling of lives in a consumer society that has come adrift from meaning, trying to find it in things, or places, but unable to simply be. These are characters who do not know themselves, and often don't wish to look too closely for fear of what they might find. It is easy to understand how this book has come to be considered a modern classic. If you haven't read it already you should.

By the way, I haven't seen the film. Should I?


* The Petrified Forest was made into a film with Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart. Bogart had been in the Broadway cast and it was his first major film role.



It was also broadcast live on TV in 1955, the year in which Revolutionary Road is set.