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Richard Yates' style will wrap its tentacles around your neck and gently squeeze, which is not a great sensation unless you marvel at his skill and perception. His devastating portrait of a young couple with children who yearn for something more than the suburbs and corporate life is both a reaction to the sufficating 1950s and the universal frustrations we all feel because of the limitations of our time and place.Is "growing up" really about compromising our dreams.
Although from the outside, they look like a perfect nuclear family, there are always storms brewing. What makes them different from the rest of the world is that the Sheps and Mollys of the world "keep on keeping on." Despite disappointment, despair, and dread, most people either persevere somehow or they take steps to change their lives.Frank and April live on Revolutionary Road, and the name of their street speaks volumes. While the main character in The Mermaid's Chair was a bit vapid, superficial, and unrealistic, Revolutionary Road's Frank and April were in more serious turmoil. It could be going on right next door or in Bangkok.
It's a dark book about a couple who dealt with hard issues that just about everyone confronts at some point: dissatisfaction, angst, dashed dreams, loss of hope, unhappy childhoods, lack of parental love (April), and disillusionment (Is this all there is.). I read this book shortly after reading The Mermaid's Chair, and I can't help but think about one of the parallels: discontented, unfulfilled people and how they resolve their unhappy states. Even though the children are well taken care of physically, they seem almost to be mere appendages to the story and not really central to the Wheeler's lives. As the family's life as such ended, life went on. Will they change their lives for the better.
The story takes place in the late 1950's, and yet it transcends time, place, and culture. Poor April, forgotten and abandoned again. The reader feels their deep sadness. There's always heartache, longing, and loss. Is this move going to give them a fresh start.
They have two children and live in a nice suburban home, complete with a picture window. Richard Yates is a master storyteller, and I was both shocked and saddened by the book's conclusion.
Yates does an excellent job of depicting the idyllic suburban couple: husband, wife, and two kids. Revolutionary Road masterfully captures the tensions of marriage, the disparities between wanting to say something and what is actually said, and the escalating hpes and dreams that seem perfectly tangible and then wither away. While some of the plot, particularly toward the end, seems slightly formulaic, the overall novel is nothing short of a masterpiece.
This is a great book. It is well-written, logically organized, and the characters are well-developed. Most of it is told from Frank's perspective, and I think that if there is 1 weakness to the book, it is that we don't get enough of the story from April's side.
These days, suburban life is the stuff that TV sitcoms are made of. Mutually frustrated with their lives, the two agree to move to Europe in order to distinguish themselves from the herd. But Yates' narrative style tends to take the words out his characters' mouths instead of putting them in. The story follows Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple who had moved in from the city, ready for the world. The reader must then realize the encoded conventions of Yates' time, the unwritten laws and expectations that plague all the story's characters. The problem is that the world had passed them by. But Richard Yates' debut novel, set in 1950's Connecticut, shows us what lurks behind the picket fence. But when an unexpected pregnancy squashes that plan, reality bites so deep that it wouldn't leave enough of a marriage to save.After 463 pages of eternally cheerful neighbors, marital hell and one drinking social too many, life outside suburbia sounds pretty good.
Frank, once in search of greatness, is now bored to tears with his office job. And April, a failed actress, now struggles with life as a housewife. "R & R" also suffers from the inevitable generation gap; in an age when the average American family can't pay their mortgage, who cares about a young married couple with a home fighting like an old married couple over unfulfilled ambition. And the way in which such conventions are challenged is what makes the novel so `revolutionary.'This book is unrated: Violence, Adult Language, Adult Situations.
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