1961 The career of Richard Yates is one of the great mysteries of 20th-century American literature. His work was acclaimed by, among others, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Tobias Woolf and Andre Dubus. Revolutionary Road, his first novel, was enthusiastically reviewed and entered as a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award for fiction, alongside Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and (the winner) Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. And Yates wasn’t a one-book wonder, either. In all, he produced seven novels and two collections of short stories. Yet none of them sold over 12,000 in hardback. By his death in 1992, they were out of print, and he was forgotten.
Then, at the turn of the millennium, the novel was reissued, fronted by an admiring and perceptive introduction by Richard Ford, by Vintage in the US (2000) and Methuen in the UK (2001), and the critics fell in love all over again – especially the British. ‘The literary discovery of the year’, enthused popular novelist Nick Hornby. The playwright David Hare handed out copies to anyone who would take them. ‘It is one of the most moving and exact portraits of suburbia in all of American literature’, he said.
The movie rights languished for four decades – then, when the AMC TV series Mad Men was making the world of 1950s commuters smart again, they were bought up by BBC Films. Justin Haythe wrote a meticulous screenplay, and in 2008 Sam Mendes (American Beauty, 1999; The Road to Perdition, 2002) directed his wife Kate Winslet and her old Titanic lover, Leonardo di Caprio, in the lead roles. Suddenly on TV and in the cinema everybody was smoking again – even pregnant women. The soundtracks were electric with the zing and snap of Zippo lighters.
Set in 1955, the novel follows Frank and April Wheeler through the dissolution of their marriage. They live on Revolutionary Road in a decidedly un-revolutionary west Connecticut exurb. He commutes to a dull job writing advertising copy for an adding machine firm, and she waits at home with his dinner ready when he gets back. Tragically, they know the limitations of their neighbours and of their own lifestyle but don’t have the courage or concentration – or frankly, the talent – to escape them. Her dream of getting away to an alternative life in Paris, where she will support them while he sort-of ‘finds himself’ in some vaguely defined career, falls apart when he gets promoted and begins to take his job seriously, and she gets pregnant for the third time.
Through closely observed details of speech and behaviour, much of it comic without being mocking, Yates sucks his readers into this downward vortex, leaving them without comfort – not even the deeper truth of more classical tragedy – just the stark confrontation of failure. ‘It’s his insistence on the blunt reality of failure that drew me to Yates’, Stewart O’Nan has written. ‘In the world I knew … Fortunes didn’t change, they just followed a track into a dead end and left you there. To find a writer who understood that and didn’t gussy it up with tough-guy irony or drown it in sentimental tears was a revelation.’1 But then maybe that very honesty is what limited the book’s appeal in its first incarnation.
1 Stewart O’Nan, ‘The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print’, Boston Review of Books, October/November 1999.