Revolutionary Road

[Lichen]

When I asked why you'd "pushed on" wasn't being sarcastic or troublesome in any way. I was wondering whether there was a quality in the novel that was propelling you forward.

Maybe it is and it's just that I'm not familiar with people and situations he is observing. I certainly don't recognise the characters.

About three years ago my family and I moved to a pretty Somerset village. Initially, we fell in with an entirely inappropriate crowd. We went to dinner parties in houses that felt un-natural and alien and tried to get along with people whose ideas about life where diametrically opposed to our own. I was in a job that I hated. More than once, I held my head in hands and asked: "Has it come to this?".

Happily, it hadn't.

Perhaps this has given me a little insight into Frank and April's situation.

Here's the thing that exercised me whilst reading:

Is Yates proposing some solution to Frank and April's dilemma? If they were to embrace honesty would their problems resolve? If they'd accepted that their bogeyman - suburban mediority - was just a manifestation of their insecurities could they have led happy lives? And how could they come to this realisation.

Maybe he considered them trapped between the 50's and 60's; "modern" enough to see their predicament, but, unlike John Givings (who wouldn't givin) lacking the language and insight to work through and beyond it.

Or is it just the story of two unhappy people creating an exponentially unhappier marriage?

 

[IdleRich]

"When I asked why you'd "pushed on" wasn't being sarcastic or troublesome in any way. I was wondering whether there was a quality in the novel that was propelling you forward."

Sure, sure, didn't think you were being sarcastic or anything.

"Perhaps this has given me a little insight into Frank and April's situation."

Fair point.

"Here's the thing that exercised me whilst reading:...."

Hopefully I'll have more to say on this when I've finished it. Back to it now then through lunch break....

 

[IdleRich]

Finished now so I'll have a stab at my answers for your questions Lichen.

"Is Yates proposing some solution to Frank and April's dilemma? If they were to embrace honesty would their problems resolve? If they'd accepted that their bogeyman - suburban mediority - was just a manifestation of their insecurities could they have led happy lives? And how could they come to this realisation."

I don't think that he is proposing any solution. He seems to be saying that there is a problem with modern America doesn't he? I mean, the Campbells are happier (maybe not much but some) and presumably the Donaldsons or whatever are happier but I don't think Yates is recommending their lifestyles is he? Seems more like the classic "happy fool vs unhappy clever person" dichotomy (not that they are that clever but they realise that they are unhappy). I don't think that the Wheelers could have come to any realisation because of the type of people they are. The question is, why are they that type of people?

"Maybe he considered them trapped between the 50's and 60's; "modern" enough to see their predicament, but, unlike John Givings (who wouldn't givin) lacking the language and insight to work through and beyond it."

Possibly, America is fucked and the only sane person is in the rubber room?

"Or is it just the story of two unhappy people creating an exponentially unhappier marriage?"

I don't think so, otherwise what would be the point of the book? Just creating some miserable people to have a miserable experience so that you feel miserable when you read it?
I reckon that the point is to do with what I said above, "why are they that type of people?". Thing is, they don't seem any worse than anyone else. They are both supposedly of average intelligence, friendly and charming and at least think they have cause to believe that they are better than other people - but really they are both utterly hateful and self-deceiving. Surely the book is about how and or why "normal" people in the US might actually be totally fucked up (more how than why actually I think).

 

[you]

Although I didn't like it, ill try and contribute a bit more.

The sentiments of time, the glacial, unstoppable force ploughing through the Wheelers lives is, to me anyway, a pessimistic view of life, there is no solution, the best you can hope for is a blissful distracted ignorance of things, dreams, hopes and realities etc - "happy fool VS unhappy cleverclog's" or Frank VS Mrs Givings.

Also, the hopes and dreams etc, the wheelers both had expectation drilled into them, all their peers told them they would be rich or famous, and in their naive, youthful minds this peers opinion solidified into expectation for them, something that could only give way to bitter cynicism or their superiority notions - these both made them very unhappy, that after failing to meet so many expectations, the things that show the difference between them and "the givings' of his world" they are backed into a horrid corner where they realise they are the very sort they have been sneering at and criticising. More painful is when they try to break free from this life, when they try to fulfill their expectations of who they are, they fail. Time, responsibilities and the world extinguish their efforts and put them right back to being the sort of person they think they are so different from. They are not the film stars or astronauts they thought ( or expected, or believed or hoped ) they were, just 'boring' 'average' middle class, middle management people.

Interesting to note, Frank goes about like a zombie at the end, I think zombification was one of the wheelers criticisms of the neighborhood and its residents.

I think a big theme for this book is inconsistency between hopes, dreams and expectations and reality, opportunities, achievements and life for a whole generation of americans.

I dunno...

 

[IdleRich]

"I loved this book.... Like a more depressing John Updike."

I mentioned to one of my friends that I was reading this and he immediately compared it to the Rabbit books.

"happy fool VS unhappy cleverclog's" or Frank VS Mrs Givings.

I said that a minute ago but I reckon it's not quite as simple as that because Mrs Givings breaks down in tears at times, no-one in the book is really happy, although when she is happy she is deliberately ignoring the things that make her sad rather than dealing with them so arguably she is artificially making herself a happy fool.

"I think a big theme for this book is inconsistency between hopes, dreams and expectations and reality, opportunities, achievements and life for a whole generation of americans."

Yes, I reckon you're right. That's the thing. They may have had high hopes but not stupidly so, I mean April had a lonely childhood and Frank only started thinking he was great at high school and in the army so they weren't privileged from birth. They didn't want to be astronauts, they wanted to live in New York and spend time with clever people, their dreams weren't totally unrealistic and yet still they couldn't achieve them. And why not? Why are they so cursed to unhappiness? I think he's saying the same as you (You), basically the average American (of that generation) can't be happy.

 

[you]

Yeah, I guess "fool" is the wrong word for Mrs Giving's, but she certainly applies her own blinkers.

I think wanting to spend time with clever people, in an engaging environment is actually a pretty high hope, especially nowadays. I watched the last episode of "the office" the while ago and something Tim said really stuck with me. He said something like this.

"you spend 8 hours a day with these strangers, more time than you spend with your family, and they become your life"

I think alot of people ( e.g. - frank and his alcoholic work mate ) spend their lives in jobs that are just far too easy for them, I see some very orwellian facets in the social side of the book. One either concerns oneself with petty distractions and prolefeed or you are depressed ( frank and april ) and so maybe standardised by psychiatric treatments ( john )....

Maybe the only similarities are the down sides to consumerism???

These notions are all abit murky, ive probably gotten alot wrong.

 

[IdleRich]

"I think wanting to spend time with clever people, in an engaging environment is actually a pretty high hope, especially nowadays."

Yes, maybe so, I'm just saying that it's not totally unrealistic like wanting to be a film star or something. I think maybe that's the point of the book, the dream seems reasonable but it isn't in this brave new world.
On the other hand you might argue that they are just such horrible shallow people that even if they had achieved what they (thought) they wanted they would still be unhappy. However you slice it RY is saying that there is no way out for them I suppose.

"One either concerns oneself with petty distractions and prolefeed or you are depressed ( frank and april ) and so maybe standardised by psychiatric treatments ( john )...."

I didn't get that whole psychiatry bit at all. It seemed very much as though it was just tacked on, he makes up some rubbish about how she is damaged because she wants to have an abortion and then she goes right along with it almost straight away. Then nothing comes of it at all, don't understand why that bit was in the book really... maybe so there was an irony in him getting psychoanalysis at the end perhaps.

 

[you]

Half way through the book I really expected the relationship between John G and Frank W to become the main.....idea (?) .... yeah Frank getting treatment and Shep commenting how lifeless and self obsessed he was mmmm mind you post war I guess from what ive heard the century of the self really blossomed......

Oh - Mr Giving turning his hearing aid off is a good metaphor ive only just clocked.

To be honest I think ive projected alot of Orwellian concepts onto this, I was about to Edit my post actually.

Still think its only half baked, so many undeveloped ideas, bit frustrating.

 

[jenks]

Interesting discussion here between You and Idle, both who seem in many ways underwhelmed with the book.

just a few, random and as usual not very coherent points...

I was thinking last night about what else was around at the same time - my thoughts turning towards One Flew Over and The Naked and The Dead. And i think Yates kind of fits somewhere between the two. The war looms large in this book - in many ways the heroic moment in Frank's life - it's all downhill from there on in. He is talked up as a hero by his wife and college mates but when facing teh reality of the 9-5 he is remorselessly ground down into acceptance of values he once eschewed.

Quite clearly post-war America and mental health/illness is another theme. Kesey uses the mental institution as a metaphor for a sick society and whilst I don't think Yates handles it as well he is clearly trying to make some kind of connection. It is a theme he returns to in Disturbing The Peace, a much later novel (of course Plath is also writing about psychiatric institutions at the same time, and the shadow of the hospital is also there in Catcher In the Rye).

The idea that the only person who sees through Frank is a madman may well be a worn trope but nonetheless he is still an unsettling character ( also i think we forget just how easy it once was to get people put away).

I think what makes it work though is that it is like a King Lear, the end of the novel doesn't offer redemption, there is no-one who wins. Instead each family is broken - the Wheelers most obviously, a lobotomised drone every much as frightening as a brain dead Randal McMurphy. The Givings a fractured family where no-one is listening to each other because they don't want to hear the roar of reality and the other family (name escapes me) who live in deceit - he never lets on that his passion is for April, that every glance at his wife fills him with distaste, that in this world of freedom of choice, he has made the wrong choice.

 

[IdleRich]

"Interesting discussion here between You and Idle, both who seem in many ways underwhelmed with the book."

Glad you think so, I have to say that what You (and Lichen) said made me realise that there may have been more to the book than I originally (consciously at least) realised.

"The war looms large in this book - in many ways the heroic moment in Frank's life - it's all downhill from there on in. He is talked up as a hero by his wife and college mates but when facing teh reality of the 9-5 he is remorselessly ground down into acceptance of values he once eschewed."

Yeah, he's arguably saying it's easier to be a hero in moments of drama during the war than it is to keep going through the general hopelessness of such a life. Or at least, some find it easier, some find it harder but it's a different kind of bravery that's required. Similar theme at the end of King Rat where the guy who has learnt better than anyone else how to play the system of the POW camp is thrown immediately into shock by the rescue and peace.

"Quite clearly post-war America and mental health/illness is another theme. Kesey uses the mental institution as a metaphor for a sick society and whilst I don't think Yates handles it as well he is clearly trying to make some kind of connection. It is a theme he returns to in Disturbing The Peace, a much later novel (of course Plath is also writing about psychiatric institutions at the same time, and the shadow of the hospital is also there in Catcher In the Rye)."

Yeah, definitely. Why was that such a common metaphor then? Or is it just an obvious metaphor that they arrived at it independently (well I can see why Plath used it).

"there is no-one who wins"

It aims to be a diagnosis not a cure but I'm not sure that it gets further than listing the symptoms.

 

[IdleRich]

One thing no-one mentioned at all - the title, Revolutionary Road, as well as being the street they live on is surely more than that. I wondered if it was an ironic comment on the Wheelers' puny attempted revolt.... Richard Yates said:

"I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties"

So I guess it was ironic in a way.

 

[you]

Jenks and Idlerich - One quick gripe that I have still, a lot of this discussion is concerning interesting ideas in the book. Like the WWII shadow, the themes of mental health, conformity, expectations etc..... most of these I felt are under developed- mental health and war related themes are almost brushed over when you regard how enormous and complex they are and especially when you consider, in comparison, how much page space is given to Frank and Aprils arguing.... even in the flashbacks/memories war features pretty briefly, I think even if RY wanted to write a book about a relationships rather than war such a big life changing event should still be featured heavily, If Frank was real then im sure some of his strongest memories would be of the war - not of drinking buddies, key points in his relationship, arguments he's lost and won etc..

Maybe RY felt he wanted to write about relationships over other things, maybe, but I kinda feel that by focusing so much on the talks and life between frank and april and not on the more wider social themes RY has ended up with a slightly myopic and narrow depiction of two people rather than a wonderfully panoramic view of a couple within a society and a time.

 

[IdleRich]

I think you're right, that's what I meant about the psychology bits being tacked on. Same could be said about the war although that never occurred to me (probably 'cause it features so briefly).

 

[jenks]

Jenks and Idlerich - One quick gripe that I have still, a lot of this discussion is concerning interesting ideas in the book. Like the WWII shadow, the themes of mental health, conformity, expectations etc..... most of these I felt are under developed- mental health and war related themes are almost brushed over when you regard how enormous and complex they are and especially when you consider, in comparison, how much page space is given to Frank and Aprils arguing.... even in the flashbacks/memories war features pretty briefly, I think even if RY wanted to write a book about a relationships rather than war such a big life changing event should still be featured heavily, If Frank was real then im sure some of his strongest memories would be of the war - not of drinking buddies, key points in his relationship, arguments he's lost and won etc..

Maybe RY felt he wanted to write about relationships over other things, maybe, but I kinda feel that by focusing so much on the talks and life between frank and april and not on the more wider social themes RY has ended up with a slightly myopic and narrow depiction of two people rather than a wonderfully panoramic view of a couple within a society and a time.

But isn't this the way with many of these 'big ideas' like the war or mental health issues - they are so embedded in the time that the novel is written that they don't need to be explicated. I'm not saying he is entirely successful but more that they are just there and he knows his audience knows this too. I'm thinking about the way D H Lawrence never really mentions the first world war in his short stories but the shadow falls forever over the characters (cue someone finding an actual mention of the war froom a short story)

As Idle says, why are so many American writers interested in mental illness at this time - yeah Plath may easily be explained, but why then for all of the others? I was also thinking about Heller and the confluence of war and madness in Catch 22.

However, I think your concern with the novel is that there is too much character talk and I think that says more about Yates' model, which I think is The Great Gatsby, he even has one of the characters turn 30 and almost forget it. He seems ot want to replicate the way FSF uses talk as a way for character to be revealed without the narrator's prodding us.

They are addicted to talk, they feel that what they have to say is important in relation to what they see as the inanities of everyone else's talk. Yet in the end they have no way of actually communicating anything - even when he admits his infidelities it means nothing. Isn't that part of the idea of introducing the Giving's son - he is all talk, manically so and no-one wants to listen to him because he cuts through the social niceties to deliver his blows. (Could this be a connection to psychoanalysis - often known as the talking cure?)

I suppose I am defending the novel mainly because I think we are losing sight of how well written it is. The problem with the idea of the book club can be a kind of hyper critical approach, we damn the imperfections and forget the good stuff.

Yep, i liked it, there are problems with it but I'd rather read him than whole heaps of other stuff. I hope the next book is as readable, that's for sure.

 

[you]

I think we all said it was a page turner, very well written.

From what I remember of Catch 22 things like absurdity and mental illness etc were very much a main theme - whereas for me in RR the themes we are discussing just tend to ( understandably! ) crop up within a story.... but they are not really focused on or developed in the same way as theme around notions of time, social expectations, conformity and chatter etc... for me more a story about a bad relationship within a suburban community rather than people in a social context, any general social themes that crop up do but only in the way anti-semitism would in a Dostoevsky book... y'know.

I read this as a book about relationships, expectations and about the effect of time ( there is a whole two pages somewhere about the comforting effect of schedules, calenders, time.. ) the same attention and focus isnt exactly given by Yates' to the other themes.

It would be very very hard to develop all the themes in a world so wonderfully realised by yates, perhaps, in 2008, the facets of life I see go by underdeveloped feel much more missed and frustrating because we are all so aware of things like the war and mental health etc??

So these criticisms of certain themes being present but unexplored are perhaps a little harsh, but, the 'reader road signs' and Aprils character - er - or lack of. Are maybe valid??

Talk is certain a major theme- the hollow talk between the two couples ( Wheelers and Donaldsons ) over martinis, Mr Givings hearing aid, Mrs Givings constant gushings of chat.... most of these things seen through Franks eyes, which I felt was when the book was at its best.

He has crafted a very good story, no doubt, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the next book isn't half as readable. Maybe the next should be a book wrote in the last decade??

 

[jenks]

Yeah, fair point, these things that have interested me are not the foregrounded things and maybe it is really a book much more relationships and the slipping of time (again another key FSF theme in Great Gatsby).

I suppose that it interests me that often the social context of a novel can be so embedded at the time but become so much more appealing to a later audience. And with something like the fifties we can feel we are on the cusp of the modern world clearly but are also aware that another world (ie the War etc) still hovers in the background, unbidden.

Am up for a more modern novel next - would really like to read something that i haven't read before -with both Austerlitz and RR i knew i liked both books!

 

[IdleRich]

Never saw the Great Gatsby links (although again, it's so long since I read it, that's the problem with reading, most of what I read more than ten years ago I would probably get more out of by reading again - what's the point?), could you expound on them?
Felt sad on him turning thirty - 'cause I just did the same myself, not sure how that reflects on the novel.

"But isn't this the way with many of these 'big ideas' like the war or mental health issues - they are so embedded in the time that the novel is written that they don't need to be explicated. I'm not saying he is entirely successful but more that they are just there and he knows his audience knows this too."

Fair enough, but the guy actually fought in the war, oughtn't it to be more vivid to him?

"The problem with the idea of the book club can be a kind of hyper critical approach, we damn the imperfections and forget the good stuff."

Yes, I guess so, but that's the point isn't it? I reckon that the criticism showed me some good bits that I wouldn't have noticed though as well so it's not all bad.

 

[Lichen]

The heavy drinking is a Gatsby link. And there's another theme of the book that, arguably, wasn't developed as much as it might have been.

But I thought his powers of description and the way he drew links between people's feelings and their behviour was so accurate and well drawn as to excuse any "under-development" of plot or people. How much can one novel of 300 pages achieve?


Though I would agree that April was a pretty thin creation.


Anyone else find it funny? I laughed out aloud when Frank's frizzy haired office mistress, bounced naked on to his knee, only to be weakly dismissed by Frank. The comedy of embrassment, yes, but very well done.