The establishing shots of New York’s moonlit cityscape place us in a West Village house party throbbing with beautiful guests, where a youthful Frank is struck dumb by the sight before him. The first glimpse we get of April is from her soon-to-be-husband’s perspective it announces her as a “first-rate” girl with the world at her fingertips. Baffled by having turned into what they'd once decried, they start to look at their house up on Revolutionary road less like an idyllic home and more like a prison. Frank, like a dutiful husband, ends up taking a job at the same company his old man used to work at while April, leaving behind any ambitions of becoming an actress, hones her homemaking skills. Neat lawns, white picket fences, and picture windows suggest a comforting sense of order but also an orderly sense of conformity. Yates’ couple offers the dark underbelly of the bright postwar promise of the suburbs. The novel is a story about how their relationship and the many compromises they’ve made to maintain it have crippled them, stunting the potential they once had. Frank and April-whom everyone they know, including themselves, agree once were very special people destined for great things-have calcified into a simulacrum of what a well-adjusted married couple should look like in the mid-1950s. We’ve bought into the same ridiculous delusion.” My 24 year-old self was more than eager to watch a film that tore down that most “ridiculous” of delusions: marriage.ĭespite Yates’ protestations, there is plenty of ammunition in Revolutionary Road if one were to launch an attack on the nuclear family’s central bond. “Love me, love me, love me, love me, say you do,” Simone croons as Winslet’s April delivers the film’s key line of dialogue: “Look at us! We’re just like everyone else. Scored to Nina Simone’s rendition of “Wild Is The Wind,” the two-and-a-half minute spot features idyllic images of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as April and Frank Wheeler blissfully staring into one another’s eyes, alongside melodramatic snippets of the depressing life the Wheelers cannot escape within their suburban home. No matter, for the trailer for Mendes’ film worked just as well to sell the same conceit. Nor do any of the blurbs on its jacket-courtesy of William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut and Tennessee Williams, truly a bizarre literary trio-match the hyperbolic statement that graced its first edition. My own copy, sadly, does not have such a melodramatic image on its cover instead it features a gauzy and faded photograph of an empty red-colored 50s automobile parked on a leaf-strewn driveway. I sought out Yates’ debut novel at a bookstore in New York City in anticipation of Sam Mendes’ film adaptation. Its author may not be a maniac or a goddamn fool, but I’ll gladly admit that I am: what first drew me to Revolutionary Road was the sense that within its pages lay a story about what a crippling institution marriage could be. As critic Alfred Kazin put it upon reading Yates’ book, Revolutionary Road “locates the new American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage.” That felt like such a ringing endorsement or, perhaps, like such a titillating promise, that Little Brown decided to use Kazin’s blurb on the book’s jacket cover matched with what Yates later bemoaned, “a cheap, vulgar illustration” of a man and a woman facing away from each other. The tragic story of Frank and April Wheeler, a couple who see themselves trapped in their 1950s picture-perfect home, has long been read as an indictment of an insidious type of conformity which postwar suburban married life epitomized. His defensive stance came from what he always saw as a wild misreading of his famous 1961 novel. “Who but a maniac or a goddamn fool would sit down and write a novel attacking marriage? And who’d want to read such a novel?” For Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, these questions were rhetorical.
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