Camden Review: Richard Yates

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Published: 5 February 2009

Richard Yates

A classic novel before it was film

RICHARD Yates was transparently learning his craft in his first novel, Revolutionary Road. It has the sensitivity of language and emotional literacy that tended to elude Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and their drinking cronies for most of the time.
This perhaps explains why we have had to wait 50 years till this Barack Obama “moment of change” for the novel to become better known.
Frank and Avril Wheeler, the attractive and TS Eliot hollow-like young couple, are played in the film released last week, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
The book Revolutionary Road immediately communicates the couple’s chronic insecurities from the first paragraph.
Frank witnesses 29-year-old Avril, “a tall ash blonde with a patrician kind of beauty’s” desperation to shine centre-stage in an amateur production of The Petrified Forest in chapter one. So insecure is she that her sense of identity increasingly eludes her as the marriage falls apart.
The falling apart process continues throughout the rest of these 337 excruciatingly painful and chaotic pages.
Frank becomes more and more bored working in computers in the Knox Building where his father had once worked. He starts an affair with Maureen Grube, who turns out to be more sensitive than he had bargained for.
The pathos becomes more heartbreaking when Yates is describing Jennifer and Michael trying to wish Frank “Happy birthday”: “Jennifer’s voice was the loudest and Avril’s was the only one in tune when they took the high note... but Michael was doing the best he could, and his was the widest smile”.
The kids are the heart of this first novel, only visible through their invisibility, like their parents.
Yates constantly amazes by his sensitivity whereby the wounded five-year-old boy and girl in all his adult characters become increasingly revealed. That is what makes it truly into a lasting classic, strongly recommended.
John Horder

* Revolutionary Road. By Richard Yates
Vintage Classics, £7.99

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