Revolutionary Road

Rating:
Summary: This is a wonderful read!
Review: Someone told me about this book and a day later I found myself face to face with it at a bookstore and bought it. I could not put it down. I would compare how I felt reading it to how I felt when I first read a book by Sinclair Lewis, I was excited knowing that there were other books by this author for me to eat up in a great reading orgy of words that calm the brain and stories that are so real they jump off the page and appear to you in your own life.

Rating:
Summary: Devastating yet readable
Review: Yates is commonly regarded as a "writer's writer," never enjoying the huge commercial success he deserved in his lifetime. A recent biography has surmised that his refusal to insert happy Hollywood endings to his novels, which made adaptions of his books difficult, might have compounded the problem. If American Beauty was written and set in the 1950's, Yates would have been the guy to write it.

Revolutionary Road is regarded by most (including Richard Ford in his excellent introduction) as Yates' masterpiece, a devastating look at the crumbling marriage and empty lives of a middle class couple living in the suburbs. Frank Wheeler has a well-paying but mind-numbing job in the city, where he carries on a half-hearted affair with an office secretary. His wife April is a bored housewife, after her effort to join a new theater group fails miserably in one of the novel's greatest (and most uncomfortable) moments.

Frank and April enlist the services of the same shady, over-eager realtor who convinced them to move to the suburbs, and try to sell their house so they can move to Paris and start afresh. April and Frank seem to both doubt whether they will actually go through with the move, but their lives seem so empty to them in the suburbs they cling to the hope of a better life overseas.

Overall, the book is intense and yet very readable, kind of a cross between Jonathan Franzen and a middle class Great Gatsby. The Wheelers see that green light but aren't going to reach it either. I loved the scenes between April and Frank as they drove home from the ill-fated local theater premier, in which April seethes with anger and disappointment, and anything Frank says to try and help turns out to be exactly the wrong thing to say. You feel unsettled just reading the chapter, yet you can't put it down, like the desire to look at a car accident.

I am amazed that this book only recently came back into print, since the book seems as relevant today as 50 years ago when it was written. Maybe Oprah will rescue it in her rejuvenated book club. Yates, the very embodiment of the destructive personality, was a chain-smoking alcoholic, who rarely ate anything but red meat. He put everything he had into Revolutionary Road, and it deserves to be read and re-read by modern readers. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Harrowing, brilliant, superb
Review: Richard Yates's REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is one of the finest novels I've ever read. Yes, it's a scathing indictment of the emptiness at the heart of corporate capitalist suburban, status-seeking America but--as more than one perceptive reviewer had noted--it is, at base, an existential novel. April and Frank Wheeler aren't just suffering from suburban malaise; they're trying to battle the same nihilism that all intelligent people begin to battle once they look behind Oz's curtain and discover that the success game is a puerile illusion, a figleaf that cannot adequately cover up life's essential absurdity. In other words, this is a book that stares into the abyss--and the abyss stares back to horrifying effect. If you're not a conventional dullard, or don't want to be one, read this book. It may blast your life wide open, or just confirm dark truths you already know but keep under your hat for fear of being branded a naysayer and pessimist: a taboo thing to be in a society demanding that (to paraphrase Peter D. Kramer) we always be "happy and productive" even though life calls for a more complex response...

Rating:
Summary: Read It.
Review: Something intangible, subtle, draws me to this wonderful novel. The narrator is transperant. It is the type of fiction that feels like an old blanket and the feel of the pearly winter sun on a childhood morning. I did not grow up in the fifties, but I cannot help but love this novel. The characters' indiscretions are complex and tragic; their unattainable goals and blase ideas (moving to Paris and write thirty years after those WWI expatriates) are heartbreakingly authentic. This novel has aged better than anything else I have read from the last fifty years. It is too bad that it has not become as well-received as Hemingway and Faulkner's classics. Be that as it may, as I grow old I will have this novel beside Moby Dick, Madame Bovary and the short stories of Anton Chekov.

Rating:
Summary: American Classic-Reviewed by Eric Carlson
Review: Unsettling, offputting, and somewhat depressing, this very American novel is about ourselves. To read it is to see the world of 1955 without the usual props and gimmicky idealization. Revolutionary Road is Richard Yate's greatest novel--subtle and realistic, it touches notions we rarely ponder: the Wheelers are not happy in ways that are seldom explored by suburbanites of early 21st century America. They have a sense of longing for something better. Irrepressibly and arrogantly, they aspire to a fallicious and outdated vision-becoming American expatriots in Paris. Their dreams lead to a tragedy unsettling and somehow touching. If this is not the Great American Novel, I do not know what is. Thankfully, Yates does not make use of Heller's satire and Vonnegut's post-modern meanderings; instead, Yates explores the suburban dystopia without these ironic flourishes and sophomoric condemnations. He is Cheever without the poetry--a veritable Chekov of twentieth century America. This heart-wrenching story of foibles is as relevant today as it was in the fifties or 1961 when it was written. I realize that comparisons to great works have become de rigeur, but I must say that when I first encountered Yates, I felt as I had when I first discovered the works of William Faulkner or Franz Kafka. In retrospect, it is unfortunate that more will not have the pleasure of reading the Trial, Moby Dick or Revolutionary Road.

Rating:
Summary: Well-written, story of sad confused people...
Review: With no belief system (philosophical, religious or otherwise) the characters in this novel flounder about helplessly looking for personal gratification, and come up empty. Convinced that they are, (or should be), superior to everyone else, they cannot find happiness or fulfillment in "ordinary life". When they see (as they inevitably must) that they are human and have flaws, they cannot face them. Instead they are plunged into self-loathing and despair, and the resulting behavior makes the situation much worse. These characters need to grow up, look outside of themselves and try to give to others, but they are too neurotic and self-absorbed. Thus, I was left feeling numb and sad. The writing is excellent, and rings true because so many in our society (both today, and in the 1950's when this was written) share this unfortunate perspective. Thought provoking reading...

Rating:
Summary: Timeless tale of suburban angst
Review: Revolutionary Road remains relevant and real 40-plus years after its publication date, making it a classic. I don't know why I never heard of it before, or why it wasn't included in any of the literature classes I took in college.

Anyone who lives in suburbia and has that feeling of, "There must be something more," or "We're different from our neighbors," will identify with the plight of Frank and April Wheeler. Granted, neither of these characters is particularly likeable, but they allow us to see our own absurdities and shortcomings. This is a rather dark story with a pretty tragic ending, so be prepared. Yates' writing is wonderful, rich and literary.

Rating:
Summary: America the desolate
Review: You don't have to be a writer to read Richard Yates. Revolutionary Road can still stun after all these years, revealing the truths and fears that we all have first as young adults and then as aging misanthropes. (After experiencing such failures of young adulthood what else could we become?) Every word in this book rings with sharp clarity. It's actually frightening. The laughter we may utter from time to time while reading is a gutteral knowing laugh, both hideous and satyr like. We laugh from the pain--the heart ripping, gut twisting turn of events. No one deserves to live out these terrible "truths," but unfortunately we often do. And Yates presents it all casually in simple language and very straight forward. . .I think it was Swift who said satire is a glass in which everyone sees everyone but himself. And though I wouldn't definitiively call this book satire, it comes close except one can't help but see him/herself, mucking around in this detritus. . . Read the book. It's still an experience.

Rating:
Summary: A clinic on writing
Review: Yates has been called a writer's writer which I suppose is to say he's a brilliant practioner of the craft. "Revolutionay Road" is a classic of fluid writing, integrating scenes and characters, shifting focus and perspective. Sometimes while reading a book, even by the most skilled of authors, readers will come across a passage they feel could have been written better, or see a poorly drawn character or suffer a weak description, there's nothing of the sort in "Revolutionary Road."

This is a story -- set during the post World War II boom -- of a suburban couple, living what would appear to be the middle class dream. But "Revolutionary Road" punctures the notion of normacly, giving dimension to its characters and stories behind them that explain their not-so-ordinary actions.

Any surprises are mild. Yates does not telegraph what will happen, he leads to events naturally and meticulously. No actions, no spoken words are without motivation. It is why events happen rather than what happens, that makes "Revolutionary Road" a great novel.

Rating:
Summary: If you liked THE CORRECTIONS...
Review: Like Franzen's "The Corrections", Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road" is full of distasteful characters and the current society (in this case 1955) gets a scouring.

This is an excellent novel of modern culture and family life; just as appropriate today as it was over 40 years ago.

How fitting and ironic that it is the "crazy" character that has them all pegged!