What none of the principals knew then is that for all its gloominess, or maybe even because of it, “Revolutionary Road” is a novel cherished by a passionate and protective coven of admirers (including, incidentally, Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men”) who pass it along, the novelist Richard Ford has said, like a secret literary handshake. They cherish its honesty, its uncompromising exactness, the austere beauty of its prose.
But despite its many champions, the book has slipped in and out of print, never quite catching on with a wider audience, and it would probably amuse and irritate the author in equal measure to know that it has been reissued in a movie tie-in edition. (There is also a new Everyman’s Library omnibus volume that includes “The Easter Parade,” another of Yates’s novels, and “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness,” a collection of stories.)
Though he would have hated the term, Yates was a writer’s writer, or even a writer’s writer’s writer. He was extravagantly admired by his peers and by many critics; but popular success, which he cared about more than he let on, maddeningly eluded him. He was dogged by bad luck — “Revolutionary Road,” his first novel and also his best, was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award but lost to “The Moviegoer” by Walker Percy — and bad timing. At a time when postmodernism and meta-fiction were starting to become fashionable, he clung to the realist tradition of his models Fitzgerald and Flaubert.
Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road is on my short list of Great American Novels, right up there with Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge. As it happens, these are the two novels we studied in my novel writing class in grad school. Great choices.
Will the novel work on screen? Hard to say. I saw the preview and was not impressed but I'll definitely see the film.
Here's a preview in the NY Times.
2 comments:
I have seen the film and even though I think it is extremely powerful and the performances are excellent, something key is missing. I'm not sure what that is....it might be something tangible like the back-story since they only supply a small amount but I think it's that the way Yates fuses humour with catastrophe, insight with bloody-mindedness, ambition with selfishness; Yates presents a double-sided view every time and, it seems to me, about pretty much everything. He wants us as readers to work and so supplies no easy answers. The film, on the other hand, can't avoid making decisions and those decisions immediately reduce the impact of what is extraordinarily powerful on the page.
I also think Yates is far more experimental than people have hitherto felt him to be. Yes, it all happens within a realist framework but he asks far more questions than he supplies answers and that alone seems experimental to me.
I really appreciate your good comments.
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