A while back, probably mid 2008, I read and reviewed Richard Yates’
Revolutionary Road. In December of that year I saw the movie version and thought: Wow! I didn’t remember the story being so strong. Did all that happen in the book? I checked my review which said the book was really gripping, but I didn’t want to tell what happened in case anyone wanted to read it. Why ruin the story? Damn.
Revolutionary Road went back on the unread shelf. During my between-computers hiatus I reread it. Wow! Gripping story. Did all that happen in the movie? I Netflexed it. Conclusion: the movie’s good; the book is better.
Specifics (which I didn't do in my first review):
1) Frank Wheeler, the all-knowing, discontent, suburban husband says, “It’s as if everybody’d made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let’s have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let’s all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality—Daddy’s a good man because he makes a living, Mummy’s a great woman because she’s stuck by Daddy all these years—and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we’ll all get busy and pretend it never happened.” (pages 65-66) Ah, yes. The joy of striking at the shallowness of the 1950s and early 1960s. “I remember it well.”
2) And—man!—could Frank talk! “Sentences poured from him, paragraphs composed themselves and took wing, appropriate anecdotes sprang to his service and fell back to make way for the stately passage of epigrams.” (page 96) Never once does Yates need to point out how fake Frank is. (Just thought: Frank, perfect name for the character. And Wheeler? Damn! I’m jealous.)
3) April (springtime? hope?), Frank’s wife, persuades him to throw away suburbia and fulfill their youthful dreams. “Don’t you see what I’m saying? It’s got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents—it’s your very
essence that’s being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life.” (italics his) (page 114) Of course, Frank agrees. Heavens! He’d almost forgotten how wonderful he was.
4) Helen Givings, the realtor who sold the Wheelers their suburban home, has, along with her husband, become friends with the Wheelers. Helen has a bad moment after all four of them spend an unsatisfying evening together.
She cried because she’d had such high, high hopes about the Wheelers tonight and now she was terribly, terribly, terribly disappointed. She cried because she was fifty-six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who’d ever asked her to marry him, and because she’d done it, and because her only son was insane. (page 165)
She pulls herself together and goes downstairs to talk to her husband because she knows doing so will make her feel better. The chapter ends on the next page with “Howard Givings timed his nods, his smiles, and his rumblings so judiciously that she never guessed he had turned his hearing aid off for the night.” (page 166) Wow!
Summing up: Read this book! In 1961 it was up against Walker Percy’s
The Moviegoer for the National Book Award and lost. I cannot fathom why. And, yes, I have read them both. Twice.
BTW, the Givings subplot may be better in the movie than the book, but that’s because Number-One-Fan Anne What’s-Her-Name plays Helen and two terrific actors I didn’t know play Howard and the insane son.
