To some degree, all of our lives are defined by constrictions, limitations both moral and circumstantial that inhibit our actions and hobble our desires. Some of these restrictions, like marriage, are voluntary, agreements of conduct entered into willingly, even happily, in hopes of acquiring a partner's love and trust in exchange for our freedom. But others, like class, are beyond our control, ceilings cemented above us that block, or make difficult, our social advancement. Nonetheless, they are present, small confinements that, over time, accumulate until one is confronted with a choice: resign oneself to these bonds as a means of making due or rebel against them in hopes of a better, freer future. The former is easier than the latter for it requires from us nothing more than our blissful ignorance, but the latter is painful indeed, demanding that we reject our society and all its tentacles. This conflict could ask for no better illustrator than Richard Yates.
The year is 1955 and the United States is outwardly enjoying an epic, post-war economic boom unrivaled in modern history. Technologies, from televisions to power stations, from affordable cars to handy home appliances, are sweeping across the country, creating the first generation of connected citizens in a network of entertainment and industry. It is the slow, sleepy dawn of the information age.
Inwardly, however, a different story is unfolding. Women, freed during the war years to experience the liberation of work and income, are largely forced back into the home by the millions of American men returning from Europe. Minorities, welcomed into the military to fight for their country, come home to find their nation full of racism and prejudice that selfishly refuses to recognize, much less honor, their service and sacrifice. Worst of all, religion, and the social mores of the time combine in an unholy union to dictate what they consider to be the good life from which deviation is cause for concern and reproof.
Into this narrow life come the Wheelers. Frank and April were ambitious spirits, freed by the Second World War to think and act for themselves. But with the resumption of peacetime, they find their dreams of intellectual and economic freedom besieged by social expectations which demand that Frank take a stable, bread-winning job in industry while April remain at home to raise their children. This is not the lives they wanted, and yet, at each turn, they are confronted by forces beyond their control, forces powerful enough to plunge them into darkness.
Marked by innocent dreams and exquisite tragedy, Revolutionary Road is an engaging meditation on the nature of modern existence. Mr. Yates, whose talented pen effortlessly spills forth mesmerizingly cinematic prose, captures here the way in which even the best laid plans can wither away, killed by not just peer pressure from the outside, but doubts from the inside. Questions of inadequacy plague both Wheelers, prompting them to second guess their decisions, then to loath their second guessing, and then finally to act rashly, results which often lead to recrimination and discord. This pattern, though only repeated here a few times, has clearly characterized the scope of Frank and April's time together, locking them into a history from which they cannot escape.
Though much of the narrative is productively consumed by the dream, championed by April, of escaping the empty, suburban existence into which the wheelers have trapped themselves, the novel's rhetorical and thematic highs are reserved for the dominant narrator, Frank, who is realized here with breathtaking clarity. Mr. Yates in no way spares Frank by allowing his ugly thoughts to remain hidden in the shadows of his mind. No, the author dredges up every selfish urge, every vain posture, every insecure act, presenting Frank to us in a way that few will ever understand him. For though his wife has clues of his deceits and his delusions, she would never wish to imagine the ways in which his private doubts drive him to redirect his energies from helping himself and April realize their dream of being liberated people to realizing his own goal of getting his own way, whatever that entails in the moment. It is almost impossible to imagine how this demonstration of man's public and private faces could be better rendered than it is here.
Revolutionary Road has its stumbles. After establishing its eloquence and its patterns of doubt and recrimination, failure and futility, its narrative stalls, choked up by Frank's internal life which grows tiresome after awhile. Moreover, there are secondary characters here who serve little purpose but to be backdrops against which the Wheelers' flaws can be writ large. These serve little purpose but to firm up the novel's structure and fill in for the passage of time. The novel, however, largely overwhelms these off-notes with its sharpness of vision which carries the work to an appropriate conclusion.
A powerful, poignant representation of how lives are eventually, inevitably defined more by the decisions we make than by who we actually are. In this, it is an exceptional, rare read that is well worth consuming. (4/5 Stars)
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