The suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth

Review of Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961). 337 pp. Hardcover.

Frank and April Wheeler are a young couple with two kids. When they met, Frank was studying in the humanities and April was an aspiring actress. They lived a carefree lifestyle in Greenwich Village—until April became pregnant "seven years too soon." She wants to abort the child, but Frank talks her out of it. To support his new family he takes a job in sales at a large business-machine corporation, where his father had worked before him, and they move out of New York into Revolutionary Hill Estates, a Connecticut suburb. They see themselves as something greater than their suburbanite neighbours.

Some years later, they have two children and Frank is still working at the same job. April's part in a disastrous amateur theatre production of The Petrified Forest leads to a roadside argument that ends with Frank sleeping alone, while April sleeps on the sofa.

Frank and April are starting to think they aren't actually cut out for greatness and worry that they are beginning to settle for the suburban lifestyle they had disdained. Then April proposes moving the family to Paris, where she would be able to find work and support the family while Frank was freed to "find himself." But before they can leave Revolutionary Road for France, Frank is offered a promotion and April discovers she is again pregnant.

Richard Yates is a masterful wordsmith. He has a way with description, particularly, it seems, of female characters who find that age is creeping up on them. The dialogue, especially when Frank and April are arguing, is also excellent.

But Revolutionary Road is a very bleak tragedy. I have red two novels that I would characterize as more pessimistic: John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, in which protagonist Julian English self-destructs because destiny demands it; and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, in which the titular character is destroyed because the author demands it. Revolutionary Road escapes most of their fatalism, though Frank's promotion and April's pregnancy, at least, seem to be the Fates' attempt to sabotage their best-laid plans. Mainly, though, they fail because the Wheelers are terrible people.

In fact, every major character in this story is unpleasant. None of them are particularly likeable. Frank abuses his wife physically and psychologically and pursues a sexual fling with a woman in his office. April threatens to abort two of her three pregnancies rather than be trapped in a mundane suburban life. Both are ambitious, but have no idea what they're ambitioning for. April's plan to move to Paris to allow Frank to "find himself" is vague on the details of known when he'd been found. (Perhaps finding oneself involves wearing a beret, striped shirt and pencil mustache, sitting at a café on the Champs-Élysées, drinking wine and smoking Gauloises?) The Wheelers' neighbour Shep Campbell has a mad crush on April. His wife Milly is a pleasant but bland suburban housewife with some sort of class envy of the Wheelers. Their neighbour and real-estate agent Helen Givings is a chatty busybody who flips houses for extra money, because she feels she is "constantly veering toward the brink of divorce." Her husband Howard switches off his hearing aid when her yammering gets to be too much. Helen tries to impose her son John—a committed schizophrenic—on the Wheelers, thinking they would be good for him, but his uninhibited way of speaking his mind just upsets them. Frank and Shep are violent toward their wives; John is violent toward his mother.

I've never related to the cliché about oppressive suburbia, though I realize it probably wasn't a cliché when Yates wrote this. I grew up in a small town and lived in the suburbs all my adult life. Rather, I don't see the appeal of the bohemian lifestyle in the inner city that Frank and April are so nostalgic for. Contrary to what the Rush song says, it's the downtown that has no charms to soothe, unless you're soothed by noise pollution, litter, panhandlers, and the pervasive reek of cannabis. Revolutionary Hill Estates doesn't appear to have done anything wrong. When reading Revolutionary Road, it's hard to determine whether Yates is writing a jeremiad about the failure of the American Dream, or a satire on the possibility of such unpleasant creatures actually succeeding at it. The Wheelers remind me of the kind of people who move away from a badly governed state, only to push for the same policies in the new state that made the old one unlivable.

Revolutionary Road is an important novel by a neglected author. It was a candidate for the National Book Award in 1962—up against Catch-22, one of my longtime favourites, although both novels lost to Walker Percy's The Moviegoers. I'm not sure I could say I enjoyed it. I'm at least glad I read it. I could be persuaded to try another of Yates's books.