AJ Dunn Reads

  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 ...