"Revolutionary Road" (Richard Yates)
'I don't suppose one picture window is necessarily going to destroy our personalities.'
What the hell kind of a life was this? What in God's name was the point or the meaning or the purpose of a life like this?1
How do you live an honest life in a culture that stifles you?
When April and Frank Wheeler met in Greenwich Village in the heady days after the end of the war, they were unabashed non-conformists: he a veteran and self-fashioned intellectual, she a "first-rate" girl from a troubled family. But with each passing year, they strayed further from the path they had set out on: Frank took a sales job at a computer firm; April had one child, then another; they bought a house in Connecticut. Now, it is 1955, and their life, in a sea of "great hulking split levels" on the suburban fringes of New York City, has settled into a dull routine of housework, commuting, and child-rearing.
Frank and April's youthful promise has faded; they have become ordinary. But through it all their self-conceit has survived, and on the day of Frank's thirtieth birthday April proposes an audacious plan: she, Frank, and the children will move to Europe in the fall, where she will support the family as a secretary or typist, and he will finally have the time to find his calling.
April's proposal jolts Frank into immediate alarm. For all of his idle talk of Europe ("which he often described as the only part of the world worth living in"2), his acquaintance with Paris from his army days was mostly restricted to brothels, and whatever feeble command of the language he once had has long since departed him. Now he is confronted starkly with the prospect of having his inadequacies exposed, and he is terrified.
And of all the capitulations in his life, this was the one that seemed most like a victory.3
April, however, is cunning and determined, and her naked flattery ("You're the most valuable and wonderful thing in the world. You're a man."4) is enough to win him over – whether she really believes it or not.
His assent is short-lived, though, and he soon launches a rearguard action to change April's mind without ever quite coming out against it.
When April discovers she is pregnant, he seizes his chance. Through a patient campaign of attrition, he delays her from carrying out an abortion, until it is too late. They shelve their Europe plans indefinitely, to Frank's grateful relief.
> She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.5
The neat trick of Revolutionary Road is that we are never quite sure who to root for. It begins with the Wheelers questioning the honesty of their life, and ends with us questioning the honesty of their aspirations – Yates shows us that disillusionment can be as dishonest as conformity. No one is a saint in this story. And yet despite their myriad flaws and their doomed marriage, we cannot help but sympathize with Frank and April as they cling reluctantly, desperately to their fading dreams.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Originally published in 1961. Quotations and page numbers from the 2000 Vintage edition.
p. 57
p. 22
p. 115
p. 115
p. 311