I didn’t see the film, and I’m glad I didn’t. I haven’t read the literature – which, as of today, I know exists. All I had was the recommendation of one highly trusted friend, and his wife, who both went through all of Richard Yates like a dose of salts a year or so ago. So when I found this book, looking just like this picture, staring me in the face in a shop last week, I bought it, and read it with a fresh mind and a pure heart.
I’m not going to give away the story, which is almost a conventional story of the American fifties. We’re in Updike territory, in a small suburban town in Connecticut, in New York City’s commuter belt (a place your correspondent here knows well), a landscape of undulating hills, pre-revolutionary farmhouses and the modern developments that are like Malvina Reynolds’ famous song, “Little Boxes,” which we delightedly sang all over the neighbourhood when I was a kid. Presaging a memorable visual trope from “Edward Scissorhands,” the book contains several mentions of “ice-cream coloured cars” in the driveways of the houses.
So, we think we know this territory. In fact, we do know it. As such, much interest resides in that key word, “almost” – and for much of the book it is the tone of voice that carries it. It’s a forensic tone. It describes the outward, in a level of detail that is one of the reasons I gave up reading novels, but which in this book is always pointed: pointed like a skewer. These characters, fifty years and more ago, are already victims of the disjuncture between reality and advertising image. They are trying very hard to prove something to themselves, and they are fooling no one except – sometimes – each other. These are characters who can’t decide what to wear even at home, and when Yates takes you into their bedrooms to watch them decide on those slim-cut chinos and that checked shirt, you become complicit in their secret self-doubts and fakery.
One of the best things about it is how it would largely read just as well if you updated it to Stoke Newington, now. All those “Art fucking Garfunkel-looking bastards,” as my friend Kris put it, moping around in slim-cut trousers and checked shirts, proving just by being here that they’re better than everyone else and not the least bit conventional.
On the other hand, it is absolutely of the fifties. An age of conformity, and prosperity bought at a price. The golden age of the American Dream, with TV advertising in the home and all the rest of it. Of course, the contemporary dilemma parsed out in this book is the same one we live in, so what it also shows us is that we haven’t managed to escape from the fifties. The fifties was when the idea of “selling out” came in, even if they didn’t call it that yet. Holden Caulfield is a child of the fifties – and this book reminds me of a sort of grown-up Salinger. The bohemia of the Left Bank and Greenwich Village thrived in the fifties, too: the characters in Revolutionary Road, a young couple, have in fact moved from the Village to Connecticut as a response to having a baby. The novel, which begins when they have two children, charts how that works out.
Of course, it’s a tragedy. But it’s a nasty tragedy. It’s not a tragedy about the price of confirmity, it’s more about the danger of imagining yourself better than everyone else. It’s the fifties turned inside out, and I found myself laughing out loud in inappropriate places, just for the joy of it. It’s like Cheever (who is already much more interesting than Updike) without the niceness. Yates is not unkind, but he is bitter. And, unlike Cheever and Updike, who were busy faking their identities as hard as they could to transform themselves into country club types, he has no need to curry favour with that society. (Yates’ pedigree is impeccable: he went to Avon Old Farms school, a posh boys’ school in good old Avon CT, where the Baroque papa used to teach English (not at the posh one: at the town one; though to an English audience that would be exotic enough), and is right next to Simsbury – fondly known as Simsboring.)
A word on the title. Revolutionary Road is one of the best dramatic titles I’ve come across lately. And it’s absolutely spot-on. We lived, the year I was five, in Canton Center – right next to Avon – on Bunker Hill Road. In a reproduction Colonial house. In among the real ones, and the split-level ranch houses. I never really forgave my parents for leaving New York State, but hey! that’s life. Clearly my karma was demanding neat lawns, kitchen witches and ornamental gourds on a big scale. The title evokes the place with pristine economy.
One of the best characters in Revolutionary Road, by the way, must be modelled on Yates; well, there are two, but I’ve sworn to give no spoilers. This one is a man with a name so plain he sounds like a dog, whose idyll is part of his lifelong escape form a rich, pampered, effeminate, private-school upbringing. All he wants is to mix with normal manly men and drink beers and do things with his hands. But he is just as deluded as the others! Oh, it’s delicious.
Of course, in our semi-suburban idyll of the intelligentia, we were possibly just as deluded; I’m not sure. The real issue is that, when identity comes pre-packaged and doled out in style magazines and cultural signifiers, no one can be innocent. That’s what we didn’t realise as we racketed our Malvina Reynolds around the neighbourhood.
PS: a few notes.
1. The other person I thought of over and over as I was reading is Jonathan Franzen. He is as unsparing but ultimately sympathetic to his characters, is human in fact. And has a beautiful clear narrative style. The kind of style you look through, not at.
2. Unlike Updike, no one will say Yates can’t write women. As with The Corrections, one of the most vivid, well-observed and moving moments in this book involves a woman alone in her bedroom thinking about her life (while changing her clothes). (He is great with clothes.)
3. Another thing about this book: Work! Long sections describing the character’s days at work. It’s gorgeous. We don’t have enough books about work-in-life.
4. Which brings me to the elephant in the room: Mad Men. Same territory, but impossibly more complex, and from a completely different vantage point. I’m very interested in Mad Men, but it requires another post, or series of posts. It’s essentially about us, not them, and it’s as sneery towards the past as these young people are to their neighbours. Because it is in, and is based on, and is, advertising. The current series seems a little more open-minded than Series 1 was, which is why I say more than one post.
Baroque in Hackney 