Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

 

Revolutionary Road

by Richard Yates

The decline of a marriage in post-war suburbia is the subject of Revolutionary Road. It is a story of marriage and selfhood, manhood and womanhood, parents and children, mental illness, conformity, class, and status.

Frank and April Wheeler are in a marriage that is mostly surface level and unsatisfying for either partner. April wants to see Frank as an ideal man who is self-possessed and intellectually stimulating, but he falls short of her expectations. Frank wants to be admired by April, and he also wants to control her, which has disastrous results at the end of the book.

Their lives are consumed with showing good taste and not giving into the banality they see as suburban life, where everyone is a cookie cutter image of their neighbors, living dull lives, locked into jobs they despise and never being able to be the person they would have been otherwise. Frank and April spend their time together talking about these things, disdaining them in others, and hatching a plan to try to escape the inevitability of it. When each fails the other at various points they get snippets of their own dissatisfaction with themselves and with one another until April can no longer live that way and makes a decision that has massive implications for the rest of Frank's life (and the lives of their children).

Revolutionary Road explores what it means to be a man or a woman in America and the facade we put up for ourselves and others as a way to protect ourselves from the pain of conformity. The story also talks about the ways in which children are affected as adults by the ways in which their parents treated them. Frank and April want to be different than their parents, but can not escape the damage that was done to them. Instead, they pass the damage down to their own children.

This book was intense in many parts, as April and Frank openly speak to one another about their shortcomings and their faults with one another. It is honest about the ways we try to make ourselves look better than we are, the way we deride others for being what we're afraid we, ourselves, are. There is no happy ending to this book, and I appreciated that. How could there be? I'm giving it 5 stars.