Review

American beauty (Circa 1955)
Richard Ford

New York Times Book Review; New York; Apr 9, 2000

As "Revolutionary Road" approaches its 40th year in print, it seems odd to imagine readers opening it for the first time. So primary and forceful have been this novel's appeal and effects pon two generations of us that to not already know Richard Yates's great book seems incongruous, and handing it over cold feels clumsy; a bit like introducing a sage old friend to a precocious new friend: we almost would rather not, for all the crucial things that cannot be thought and said again. And yet of course we must, since great books, like great friends, are to be shared.

Suffice it to say that among readers of American fiction since the beginning of the 1960's, "Revolutionary Road," published to acclaim in 1961, has become a kind of cultish standard. And this is especially true among writers, who have kept its reputation burnished by praising it, teaching it, sometimes unwittingly emulating its apparent effortlessness, its complete accessibility, its luminous particularity, its deep seriousness toward us human beings - about whom it conjures shocking insights and appraisals. We marvel at its consummate writerliness, its almost simple durability as a purely made thing of words that defeats all attempts at classification. Realism, naturalism, social satire the standard critical bracketry - all go begging before this splendid book. "Revolutionary Road" is simply "Revolutionary Road," and to invoke it enacts a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees.

Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1926, and died in 1992 in the Veterans Administration Hospital in Birmingham, Ala. He did not attend college after high school; served in the Army during World War II; was twice divorced and was the father of three daughters. For a time after the war he worked as a publicity writer for the Remington Rand Corporation, and for a brief period in the late 60's served as a speechwriter for Senator Robert Kennedy. But for the most part Yates was solely a writer, only occasionally supplementing his income by teaching and by writing for the movies. During his writing life he wrote seven novels (including "Revolutionary Road") and two books of short stories, many of which have been anthologized and are richly admired by readers as models of the form.

Yates - who was both famously decorous and famously plain-spoken - once remarked to an interviewer that he felt he had written too little in his life, and that his was the misfortune to have written his best book first. And although over his 30 years of public life as a writer Yates's reputation rose, then fell, then rose again, ultimately distinguishing him as that ambiguous thing, a "writer's writer," one who does not make it (as did his contemporaries Cheever, Updike, Walker Percy) into the permanent, big-money main arena of American literary fashion, it is also true that nothing he wrote came near the achievement and acclaim of "Revolutionary Road," which "lost" the 1961 National Book Award to Walker Percy's novel "The Moviegoer."

The story line of "Revolutionary Road" can be summarized succinctly:

In the spring and summer of 1955, in the western Connecticut bedroom community of Revolutionary Hill Estates, the lives of the young Wheeler family April, Frank and two minor children - become essentially and violently unglued, never ever to be as they were.

To a casual passer-by, the Wheelers' lives might not seem so different from their neighbors' - the pleasures and anxieties being the available, expectable ones: participation in the community theater group, tipsy, twilight dinners with other like-minded homeowners, easy shots to and from the commuter line, the comfort of being indistinguishably in the culture while staying solidly in command of life's fundamental choices; and - less cheerily - a wan inability to keep the frustrations of youth's passage precisely at bay, the fatigue of the workplace grind, the puzzlement of keeping life interesting and vigorous while maintaining the nuclear unit intact.

But into the Wheelers' lives comes much that is not good, even if no single visitation seems exceptional enough to render the whole unsurvivable. Frank and April regrettably harbor little affection for each other. Each dislikes the suburbs and talks about it too much. The children provide the standard trials. Frank's work in the city is, he admits, "the dullest job you can possibly imagine." And April, with too little to do, embarrassingly and publicly fails as a little-theater actress. On top of it all the Wheelers drink too much, are bored stiff by their neighbors, feel vaguely fearful of being cliches, and as a consequence view their future as indistinct but unpromising.

Still, April Wheeler proves resourceful and devises a romantic solution to her and Frank's growing malaise. They will sell their house and move to Paris. There Frank can "find" himself; she can join the secretarial pool at NATO, and the kids can learn French. After that, the future can take care of itself on the cheap, while they gain confidence that life is not being played out in cloying ways.

Only Frank Wheeler has already begun to supplement his unhappy married life by skulking into a tacky office affair with the uncharitably named Maureen Grube. In every way but the stated, he fears the change that April's Paris plans will bring. And for this reason, and contrary to his bitter expressions about his nothing job, Frank allows himself to be coaxed into the "better" job of writing motivational talks for the new sales arm of his company, Knox Business Machines, which is extending its old-fashioned product lines for the new 50's computer age.

PLANS, however, proceed toward selling the house. Frank's office liaison begins, stops, then flares again. His reluctance about moving grows. The children not surprisingly become confused. Frank and April fall into arguments, endure loud, unwanted divulgences, suffer accusations and retractions, slaps to the face, fleeings, returnings, outrages, until their moving plans are abandoned, and with that decision the Wheelers' anchorage to some good life they'd chosen gradually, then swiftly, then suddenly, violently, tragically disappears. All of it seemingly gone in one balmy summer that might have ended well for some family other than the Wheelers.

"The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves. . . . A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place. Except for the whisk of his shoes on the asphalt and the rush of his own breath, it was so quiet that he could hear the sounds of television in the dozing rooms behind the leaves - a blurred comedian's shout followed by dim, spastic waves of laughter and applause, and then the striking-up of a band."

In 1961, "Revolutionary Road" must have seemed an especially corrosive indictment of the postwar suburban "solution," and of the hopeful souls who followed its call out of the city in search of some acceptable balance between rough rural essentials and urban opportunity and buzz. Frank Wheeler, the novel's principal character, is 29, already a combat veteran and a Columbia graduate and outwardly a man on the way up. Yet Yates depicts him sarcastically as a compromised, self-important "suit" with "the kind of unemphatic good looks that an advertising photographer might use to portray the discerning consumer of well-made but inexpensive merchandise." In the novel's close notice Frank is a deluded, dissipated bore who imagines himself "as an intense, nicotinestained Jean-Paul-Sartre sort of man," but is merely an adulterer spicing his talk with literary references while following work so stultifying and meaningless that he even laughs at himself.

April Wheeler is also a youthful 29, though unappreciated by her husband, who sees her as a "graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny." Yates imagines April slightly more charitably - as a slightly dazed, slightly spoiled, actress wannabe possessing no particular good will for her spouse, who still struggles to set a go-nowhere life onto new rails that will lead her family (or more particularly lead her) to Paris and a main chance at freedom. Yet April finally succumbs to a lack of vigor and becomes complicitous in being lied to, then tricked and demoralized, then driven crazy, and finally done in by circumstances she simply lacks the moral vigor to control.

Over the nearly four decades since the publication of "Revolutionary Road," commentators have almost always characterized Yates's novel as "bleak" and his vision of Americans and American life in the suburbs as, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, people adrift in "a sad, gray, deathly world." Yates himself, never one to pull a punch, admitted to an interviewer in 1974 that he "meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 . . . our best and bravest revolutionary spirit had come to something very much like a dead end in the 50's."

And indeed, a citizenry's urge to break away and form a community based on clear ideas of who the citizens are, what they need and what they're up against is very much the model for correct deportment in Yates's view. Though in "Revolutionary Road" this is precisely the ideal that the suburbs - monotonous, anesthetized buffer zones between the two more vital life experiences of the country and the city - manage to trivialize and contaminate. Suburbanites themselves seem but hungry, aimless foragers in pursuit of not a better life but only an easier, less responsible one. None of the characters glimpsed in "Revolutionary Road" have much of a clue about who it is they are. They can't, in fact,. admit it fast or often enough. All are walking paths laid out by forces and authorities other than their own personal senses of right and wrong: Convention. Habit. Disengagement. Mammon. Escape. "He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive," Yates's narrator remarks caustically about Frank Wheeler. And as her life is swept along toward the novel's withering climax, April Wheeler, in despair nearly unto death, peers at her neighbor, the feckless Shep Campbell, there in the gloom of a back seat where they've fallen upon each other in a drunken moment of befuddlement and sexual dismay: "Honestly," April says, stating no more than what's obvious. "It's just that I don't know who you are. . . . And even if I did . . . I'm afraid it wouldn't help, because you see I don't know who I am, either."

No one (except perhaps the children) really comes out looking very good in "Revolutionary Road." Even Yates's supporting cast of neighbors, venal business types, blustery bosses, nosy realtors and nut-house residents all seem deluded and discredited, each in her or his own way, disabled as doers of right, or incapable of the sort of affiliations that could weave a fabric of communal spirit strong enough to hold the weak should they falter, or console the despairing when they sound a plea.

Back in 1984, in a not particularly admiring essay about Yates's novels, Anatole Broyard of The New York Times noticed and then complained about what still seems to me a crucial fact about "Revolutionary Road" - a feature with which I myself have no complaint. "The main question in Mr. Yates's work," Broyard wrote, "is whether we are being asked to see around, or beyond, the characters to some kind of symbolism - or to take them literally. Are we supposed to forgive their shortcomings and their failures as God does, or are they being offered up as intrinsically interesting without extenuation? Is his perspective metaphysical or entomological?"

BROYARD'S is, indeed, an issue of particular importance for appreciating "Revolutionary Road." On the one hand Yates's consummate talent for devising and developing the particulars of life-as-lived, his willingness to put his imagination at the service of taking life seriously, his ability to invent plausible human emotion before we can experience it, and then put it to word - all this would speak for a perspective of man-seen-as-literal-creature. And yet, there is so much in this novel that's sarcastic, comical, mischievous, hyperbolic, as to argue not for the literal but the emblematic Broyard's "metaphysical." All these extraliteral names: Mrs. Givings the ungiving realtor; Shep the bird-dogging neighbor; the improbable Oat Fields, Frank's father's Dickensian boss; the implicitly grubby Ms. Grube; even the reeling Wheelers themselves, spinning out of kilter and down the road to disaster. Plus all the archly amplified description that eventually brings everyone into the flattening light of derision and satire, as with the pathetic Mr. and Mrs. Livings, on the day they visit their son in the "home" where he's "resting" up for the travail that will be the poor rest of his life:

"In the outer waiting room of Ward Two A, after they had pressed the bell marked RING FOR ATTENDANT, Mr. and Mrs. Livings shyly joined a group of other visitors who were inspecting an exhibition of patients' artwork. The pictures included a faithfully rendered likeness of Donald Duck, in crayon, and an elaborate purple-andbrown crucifixion scene in which the sun, or moon, was done in the same crimson paint as the drops of blood that fell at precisely measured intervals from the wound in the Savior's ribs."

Moreover, just how bad can it literally be out there in the burbs where Frank Wheeler can dopily muse, "Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminoted" - and yet where almost nobody's character shows capacity to change, but only to suffer? How unhappy and morally compromised can the Wheelers make each other and stay credible as fellow humans? "He could be grateful in a sense that he had no particular area of interest," the narrator notes, airily sizing up Frank's life: "In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field."

In Broyard's creaky terms, "Revolutionary Road" seems to want it both ways - the "entomological" and the metaphysical; the literal and the symbolic. Broyard felt that in choosing both modes the novel did neither very well. But for my money, by allowing at least two strategies of representing reality to share time, Yates brought to life all the more remarkable a novel; brought us - through art - near enough to life's palpable details that we can recognize our own lives, yet preserved for us a distance from which we can exercise moral judgment and be relieved that the Wheelers aren't us.

To me, at 56, 1955 doesn't seem so far away now. And opened fresh today, "Revolutionary Road " manages to testify both to how much in American culture has shifted since the 50's, and how much from that odd time remains lively in our moral imaginations. Everyone in "Revolutionary Road" drinks way too much, and everyone smokes. Pregnant women do both with utter alacrity. Business lunches feature four martinis, and afternoons are sacrificed to trysts with your secretary, followed the next morning by the gentleman slinking in, making nice, but never calling again. Frank Wheeler smacks April around when he gets a little loaded, and April by and large lets it happen. Wives mostly stay near to home, don't earn a paycheck, do not attend consciousnessraising seminars. Business downtown is still Bartlebyesque with offices in big open rooms, "ablaze with fluorescent ceiling lights, that had been divided into a maze of aisles and cubicles by shoulder-high partitions." There are as yet no cell phones, no faxes, no call waiting, and salaries are insufficient for ski weekends in Sugarbush. There is no Sugarbush, no 10-K races, no Outward Bound.

AND yet "Revolutionary Road" stands at the beginning of the new computer age, and chronicles its early fascination with empty communication, which has led us to self-absorption, narcissism, megalomania and unwanted e-mail. "It's a completely new kind of job, and we're going to have to develop a completely new kind of talent to do it," brays the bulbous Bart Pollock to the feckless and fearful Frank after knocking back one more big gin. Frank Wheeler is that new man, the heir apparent, "selling the electronic computer to the American businessman," and thus heralding "a whole new concept in business control."

And beyond dubious business ethics, the novel's denouement hangs upon the rather up-todate dilemma of whether April Wheeler can raise her consciousness enough to nervily defy her husband, break ranks and terminate a pregnancy she fears will ruin her life. Although contemporary readers will shake their heads at the disastrous course April chooses for assuring her future, no one can argue the novel's clear-sightedness and perfect pitch in depicting a transition in modern moral life and in scrupulously calibrating the fearsome human cost attendant to great societal change.

Over the years, few even approving com mentators have remarked on what a funny book "Revolutionary Road" is, its black-onblack grimness and serious moral mien perhaps overmatching most critics' comic sensitivity about an era we normally don't think of as chock-full of laughs. And certainly no one comes to the conclusion of "Revolutionary Road" in a state of rollicking high spirits. But comic are unquestionably this novel's means, start to almost finish: arch exaggeration of the smallest human pomposity and social ritual; fatal portraits of marriages gone absurdly bust; surgically accurate cameos of lesser players and unusually cruel assessments of ignorance posing as innocence. Here are the ill-starred Wheelers once again with their "friends" the clueless Campbells, convening another cozy neighborhood intime:

" `Hi! They called to another.
" `Hi! . . . `Hi!' . . .'
"This one glad syllable, borne up through the gathering twilight and redoubling back from the Wheelers' kitchen door, was the traditional herald of an evening's entertainment. Then came the handshakings, the stately puckered kissings, the sighs of amiable exhaustion `Ah-h-h'; ' Who-o-o' - suggesting that miles of hot sand had been traveled for the finding of this oasis or that living breath itself had been held, painfully, against the promise of this release. In the living room, having sipped and grimaced at the first frosty brimming of their drinks, they pulled themselves together for a moment of mutual admiration; then they sank into various postures of controlled collapse."

There are moments in reading "Revolutionary Road" when I'm made to wonder exactly which human qualities its author would finally sponsor as both virtuous and practicable. What would prove adequate to hold the fabric together long enough to get through life in one acceptable piece? Clearly something more's required than the standard livelihood protocols - the train, the office, advancement, collegiality - since all lead to other postures of controlled collapse. Marriage qua marriage is also plainly not adequate. Likewise parenting. Paris - the old, fragrant dream of freedom - seems out of reach.

Clearly some more straitened form of life is required, one in which what we say strictly corresponds to what we mean. We also might not care to ask very much of others. And there might not be that much fun around. Indeed, Yates's dark humor seems calculated less to please us than, as with any satire, to soften us up for the sterner truths.

And there's no escaping stern truth here. But goodness knows there's so much along the way to like and admire that, stern truths or no, you're sorry when it's over - sorry in more ways than one. Mostly "Revolutionary Road" is just so smart and keen and shockingly inventive about everything it turns its imagination to: about being young and blissfully rudderless in New York City before the responsibilities of marriage and family cloud the sky; about entertaining the awful neighbors; about long, long business lunches; about being 30 and feeling middle-aged; about fearing change when you know change is likely to save you; even about the pink light seen through a poor man's earlobe, palely summing up all of humanity's frailty and failure:

"Isn't there any cake?" inquires the recumbent Howard Givings of his dutiful realtor wife. "I thought we still had some of the coconut cake."
" ' Well yes, dear, but you see I thought we'd just have the plain tea today because we'll be having such an early dinner.' She explained all over again about her engagement with the Wheelers, only dimly aware of having told him before, and he nodded, only dimly aware of what she was saying. As she talked she stared in absent-minded fascination at the way the dying sun shone crimson through her husband's earlobe and made his dandruff into flakes of fire, but her thoughts were hurrying ahead to the evening."

If we finally see the Wheelers and their set as strange and remote "50's types" with their smoky Paris reveries, their gooney business pontifications, no-fuss sexual dalliances, their memories of youth and a just war fast receding, we should still, I would plead, let this novel have its way with us. Types always come to us from some fast truth somewhere. And by envisioning the change from one small, not-so-long-ago era to another - to our very own era, in fact - "Revolutionary Road" looks straight at us with a knowing and admonitory eye, and invites us to pay attention, have a care, take heed, live life as if it mattered what we do, inasmuch as to do less risks it all.

Richard Ford is a novelist and short-story writer. This essay has been adapted from his introduction to a new edition of "Revolutionary Road," being published later this month by Vintage.

Copyright New York Times Company Apr 9, 2000