Revolutionary Road

Yates opens on an amateur theatrical disaster and never really leaves the stage: Frank and April Wheeler are, before anything else, performers, cast by themselves as the one sensitive, intelligent couple trapped among the mediocrities of Revolutionary Hill Estates. Their shared myth — that a move to Paris will let them finally become the people they secretly already are — requires constant maintenance, and the novel tracks with surgical patience how much cruelty that maintenance demands: every argument is really an argument about which of them is failing to live up to the fantasy. The suburb itself is barely characterized as monstrous; it's the Wheelers' contempt for it, curdled into self-congratulation, that does the damage.

John Givings, the neighbors' institutionalized son let out for occasional visits, functions as the novel's designated truth-teller, the only character licensed by his diagnosis to say the unsayable — that the Paris plan is a fantasy, that Frank doesn't really want to go, that April is the only one who meant it. His bluntness is unbearable precisely because he's right, and the fact that only a man certified insane can say so is Yates's bleakest joke about suburban civility: everyone else has agreed to be too polite, or too invested in their own performance, to tell each other the truth.

On publication in 1961, Revolutionary Road was a National Book Award finalist — losing that year to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, in a shortlist that also included Catch-22 — and drew immediate admiration from Kurt Vonnegut and Tennessee Williams, both of whom recognized in Yates's flat, exact prose a kind of American tragedy usually reserved for grander subjects. Despite that, Yates spent much of his career as a writer's writer: deeply admired by other novelists, chronically under-read by everyone else, and largely out of print by the time he died in 1992.

The book's afterlife has more than made up for it. Richard Ford has championed Yates as the least sentimental chronicler of postwar American domestic life; Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio's 2008 film adaptation — a pointed, ironic reunion of the Titanic leads inside a story about a marriage that can't survive its own illusions — introduced Revolutionary Road to a much wider readership and cemented its reputation as the founding text of suburban-disillusionment fiction, the book Cheever, Ford, and Franzen are all in some sense answering.