Revolutionary Road

Back cover: Hailed as a masterpiece from the moment of its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple whose empty suburban life is held together by the dream that greatness is only just round the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their hopes and ideals, betraying in the end not only each other, but their own best selves.

"The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium."

If nineteenth century classics are recognised by their verbose writing (a sentence long paragraph that actually looks like a paragraph) then I think the twentieth century was when writer's experimented with the bare bones, with giving you the character in this moment rather than introducing every character by showing a family tree and their life history. I was trying to pinpoint what it is about Yates's simple writing style -- reminiscent of Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway, whose styles you can read about on Mood's post -- that appeals to me, and I think it's the fact that it feels more grown up. You're given more credit for picking up on what's going on beyond the words being said and the gestures made.

The use of objective correlative -- showing a character's actions and letting them speak for themselves rather than saying the character did this because XYZ -- and subtext in dialogue makes this seem more, well, real. We don't always know what people mean by their actions, though we like to read magazine articles about body language so we can convince ourselves we know what it means when someone crosses their arms, and the fact that we have to work out what the characters are really feeling and really talking about feels like real life. Sometimes a character or a narrator throws judgements onto the actions, but that doesn't mean they're right, and it can lead to the reader and the character/narrator having different ideas about what's happening. The couple argues about him watching the game and they're really arguing about the fact that she feels underappreciated, the man wishes he could visit the cabin he used to vacation at, go fishing in the lake again, but really he just misses his dead father who put his first fishing rod in his hand. The conflict isn't just about the surface problems; the tension gets compounded by the humming subtext, the unspoken feelings, and the tension of holding thoughts back. The sentences that largely describe things that can be seen or heard, or generally sensed, the simplicity of showing the world as it is, highlights the things that aren't being talked, or written, about.

And in this case, to actually discuss the book, it's about a marriage falling apart and two people trying to figure out how the hell they ended up where they are. But of course they don't do that by sitting down and saying 'gosh, honey, how did we wind up in the suburbs with two kids and a life we hate?'. They try to work it out by destroying everything, and seeing how that makes them feel. This week's quote is, strangely enough, a giant paragraph, but it's so good:

"At first glance, all the upper floors of the Knox Building looked alike. Each was a big open room, ablaze with fluorescent ceiling lights, that had been divided into a maze of aisles and cubicles by shoulder-high partitions. The upper panels of these dividers, waist to shoulder, were made of thick unframed plate glass that was slightly corrugated to achieve a blue-white semi-transparency; and the overall effect of this, to a man getting off the elevator and looking out across the room, was that of the wide indoor lake in which swimmers far and near were moving, some making steady headway, some treading water, others seen in the act of breaking to the surface or going under, and many submerged, their faces loosened into wavering pink blurs as they drowned at their desks."

Drowned by the worthlessness of their work, all the swimmers indistinct in their conformity, the rat race symbolism of the maze, and a great visual. And we don't need to have it spelled out for us that this metaphor extends to Frank, who's about to dive in, to make a terrible pun. We don't get a winding history and explanation of how much he hates his job and why (they're just treading water), he shows us how he feels about his work environment and his colleagues and we can extrapolate to include him because he works there too. So I guess despite the simple style, or because of it, we have to do more work as the reader. And that's not a bad thing. The role of the reader becomes even more important because we can all fill in the blanks however we want.