Revolutionary Road

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, Richard Yates

I know it seems like I'm jumping on the bandwagon with this one, but I actually finished it before the movie came out and before it graced the pages of the New York Times Bestseller list, so I guess you could say that I'm driving the bandwagon. Yes, I'm a trend-leader and all the rest of those people with the movie tie-in version of the book are just followers. Having said that, this book is fabulous. Since it's been more than a month, my comments on this will be brief. Yates has the clean, direct style that I loved in Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides. That's not to say that there's no descriptive prose, just that you don't get this feeling that entire chapters, passages, characters are unnecessary. In fact, just the opposite, there are only 7 characters that are actually people with sides, nuances, personalities. The rest are merely background noise, stereotypes of who they are and what they should be, and their sole purpose for existing is to be literary devices for Yates in the lives of his central characters.

I'm sure everyone has been peppered with the synopsis of this book from TV, movies, etc., so you all get the drift. Suburban malaise in the most painful and deadly way. Two twenty-somethings who are convinced they are destined to lead more extraordinary lives than settling in Connecticut and raising 2.5 children, they have always planned for something greater than their current situation. When it reaches the point of being unbearable, they make plans to escape their predetermined destiny and, well, plans just sort of unravel from there.

Yates is a beautiful writer. I regret being unable to say more about it, but I waited a long time from finishing it to writing it up (mostly due to turmoil in my own life). Having said that, it really is worth the read, beautifully written, identifiable characters. It has a haunting quality that nags at me long after I finished.