Review: Revolutionary Road

Book: Revolutionary Road

Author: Richard Yates

First published: 1961

Current publisher: Vintage Classics

Format: Paperback

Page count: 334

The physicals: Second-hand paperback Methuen edition

Procurement: Bought from a charity shop

Price: £2.00

One of the best £2 I've ever spent. What a brilliant novel this is. I saw the film a few years ago with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio and felt drawn to the story. The book went onto my mental TBR list, and finally I spotted a copy last year in a charity shop and picked it up. I only wish I'd read it sooner, because it is astonishing.

This is an open wound of a novel, confrontational and brutally honest, but with no authorial judgement of its very flawed characters. The pathetic nature of life is scrutinsed, as are the natures of hopes, dreams, disappointments, and betrayals. I didn't like any of the characters. I probably would not want to hang out with any of them in real life. But I loved them and cared about them, and above all I feared for them, particularly the fragile April.

The writing is eminently readable: intelligent, alive, and entertaining. I engaged with the story from the very first sentence: The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium. This is one of the best opening sentences I've seen because it pretty much encapsulates the entire story. All the characters in the novel are acting a part, and to no audience, really. The stark, ultimate, nature of life.

The American dream is studied too, and it doesn't come out of this story too well. Dreams are shattered, essentially. Yet the American lifestyle portrayed here is glamorous and modern, and rather hedonistic in between all the inevitable hard work. The novel depicts the America we all knew, or thought we did. Revolutionary Road is an unsettling novel, both bleak and funny, realist and symbolic. It's a novel that hits the sweet spot: serious but readable, with a decent plot and no pretension. A true great of twentieth century literature.

Shelf: TBR again shelf. I recently had a purge of my books, bagging up loads for the charity shop, but not this one. Will read it again.

Would recommend to: Readers who enjoy intelligent literary fiction by a writer who deeply understands the tragedy and comedy of the human condition, and isn't afraid to lay it bare on the page.