Drama in Suburbia

Ever since he drew my attention some years ago to the best book I’ve read in the last decade – Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell – I have trusted Nicholas Lezard’s judgement. And if I remember correctly, it was his recommendation in the Guardian that also made me rush out to find Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, of whom I had never heard. It wasn’t in the shops, so I had to order it.

When the book arrived, I was almost put off by the image on the jacket. It was of a car, and if there’s one thing guaranteed to make me not want to pick a book up, it’s a machine on the front. (There’s a lively debate among the writers I know about what constitutes an effective cover. I say a human face or figure is a good idea. A friend of mine who writes romantic comedies disagrees: what she likes is a landscape or a still life. Some say blue is a turn-on, others hate books with brown covers.) Ignoring the car, however, I turned to the accolades on the jacket. David Hare, Kurt Vonnegut and even Tennessee Williams had apparently all adored it, and the introduction was written by one of my favourite writers, Richard Ford. I read the book at once and ever since I’ve been trying to tell people about it without, I fear, making much of an impression, except on members of my own family. My husband became such a fan that he then went on to buy and read Yates’s other (excellent) novels. Revolutionary Road was first published in the United States in 1961 where it was nominated for a National Book Award and was very successful. It didn’t, however, do very well when it was first published in this country in 1986. So what can I say to persuade readers of Slightly Foxed that here is something out of the ordinary and well worth searching out? Well, paradoxically what makes it extraordinary is that it’s about unremarkable people who live in ordinary houses in an ordinary street in suburban America in the Fifties. Realist fiction at its very best tells us not only about its characters but also about ourselves, and there are so many emotions here that we can all recognize, so many situations that we can understand. To read Revolutionary Road is to inhabit Yates’s suburban world. Frank and April Wheeler have two children and they live in the Revolutionary Road of the title. He is a small-time ad man and she has dreams of something better than her present life. She’s a member of the local amateur dramatic society and the novel begins with the toe-curling embarrassment of her first-night failure. You could say that the action in the rest of the novel stems from that night. Eventually April decides that if the family uproots itself and moves to Paris, then all will be well. Frank and she will both fulfil their potential abroad in a way they never could at home. You know, as the reader, that it will end in tears, and so it does. The family never does get to France. Frank has an affair at the office. April becomes pregnant by another man. And their lives unravel before your very eyes. Their neighbours, their friends, the whole community, in fact everything around them, conspires to confound their dreams. The plot has an inevitability and inexorability reminiscent of Hardy, but I won’t give away any more of it here. The best thing about Yates’s work is not so much what he does as the way that he does it. His writing is so good that you don’t notice how he achieves his effects: it’s never arty or self-conscious but seems, in the words of Joseph O’Connor writing about John McGahern, ‘as if it had somehow grown on the page’. Here he describes the Wheelers’ feelings as a row evolves into something ghastly:

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 round each other’s strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath, it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on.

But Frank and April love one another and the tragedy is that all their love and shared life aren’t proof against the ambushes of circumstance. Yates is wonderful at pointing up the gap between our fantasies of what we could be and what we truly are: flawed creatures who have to do the best we can whatever happens to us. Although it has touches of humour, Revolutionary Road can’t be called a happy book. But reading it leaves you in awe of a writer who has gazed unflinchingly at his characters, understanding them completely and revealing their secrets to his readers. So ignore the car on the cover and read this great novel. It is one that you won’t forget.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 5 © Adèle Geras 2005