Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Summary
Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple settled into a Connecticut suburb in 1955, privately believe they are better than the conformity around them, and they build an elaborate plan to prove it: April will support the family with a job in Paris while Frank finally figures out what he actually wants to do with his life. The plan collapses almost as soon as it becomes real. April discovers she is pregnant with a third child, and Frank, offered a promotion he had claimed to despise, quietly lets the Paris scheme die rather than risk the security the job offers, choosing comfort over the version of himself he had promised April, and himself, he still was. April, recognizing exactly what has happened, attempts to end the pregnancy herself at home and bleeds to death before help can reach her. The novel closes with Frank hollowed out, the children largely absorbed into his brother's family, and the Wheelers' neighbors resuming their own quiet, undisturbed conformity as though nothing at all had happened on Revolutionary Road.
Yates writes with a controlled, almost clinical precision about self deception, letting Frank and April narrate their own decline in language so reasonable sounding that a reader can watch the marriage die without either character ever admitting what is actually happening. It reads with real dread building under ordinary suburban scenes, dinner parties and small arguments accumulating into catastrophe, and its refusal to grant either Wheeler an easy villain or victim status is exactly what makes the book still uncomfortable rather than simply sad.
Atlantic-Little, Brown published Revolutionary Road on March 1, 1961, Yates's first novel, and Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron and Tennessee Williams all supplied jacket blurbs before it had even found its readers.
Historical Context & Significance
Revolutionary Road was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award for fiction alongside Catch-22 and Franny and Zooey, all three losing to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a result still argued over. The New York Times called it beautifully crafted and remarkable, a deeply troubling book, praise that did not translate into the sales or the recognition the other nominees eventually found on their own.
Yates never had a bestseller and struggled financially for most of his career, and the novel drifted toward being overlooked before a sustained critical revival, helped along by novelists like Richard Ford and Kurt Vonnegut, who continued citing it as a model of American realism. Time named it among its hundred best English language novels since 1923 in 2005, and Sam Mendes's 2008 film adaptation, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Frank and April, brought the Wheelers to an audience nearly fifty years after the National Book Award had passed the book by, grossing more than seventy six million dollars worldwide on the strength of a marriage Yates had first built to be unbearable.