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Madeleine Thien

Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Vintage, HK$108
'To write so well,' wrote Stewart O'Nan  of Richard Yates, 'and then to be forgotten is a terrifying legacy.'
At the time of O'Nan's 1999 essay Yates had been dead for seven years and his nine books were almost all out of print. Now, 47 years after publication, Revolutionary Road, his first novel, has arrived on the best-sellers lists, having made its long journey from the underground to centre stage, thanks not least to the forthcoming eponymous film.
For years, as a young writer, I had heard the name Richard Yates spoken with reverence. Recently, living in Iowa City, where Yates taught from 1964 to 1971, it seemed to me that Revolutionary Road was the book on everyone's lips. It was in Iowa, finally, that I discovered what a generation of writers and readers had been whispering. Revolutionary Road is a knife-edged, disquieting and revelatory work.
The Wheelers, a glamorous, suburban Connecticut couple,   carry within them the potential to live revolutionary lives. Idealistic, politically engaged and admired  by his peers, Frank Wheeler,  the novel's anti-hero, formerly a (self-described) 'intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man', is mired in a New York desk job he accepted one day in a fit of irony. 'You played right along with it, and that's how the whole thing started,' says his wife in the first act. April is 29, educated, graced with 'a patrician kind of beauty' and, in spring 1955, still hoping to live a more honestly examined life.
Revolutionary Road has come to be known as one of the first, great anti-suburbia novels but it isn't the 'hopeless emptiness' of the suburbs that makes the Wheelers who they are; it isn't the script or the set or the cast of characters that brings them down; instead, Yates confronts us with a more crushing prospect: Frank was always a fake, April recognised his inadequacy from the beginning and they carried on in the belief that the right facade would inevitably cohere into a soul. The suburbs remain a scapegoat, incapable of polluting what was never there to begin with.
Yates' portrayal of Frank's inner voice strikes hard and unforgivingly. A man, Frank believes, commands attention, makes himself heard. Frank stores narratives and jokes that are heartfelt, ironic and falsely humble, fine-tuned to evoke the responses for which he hungers: love, devotion. The words are plastic bricks in a plastic facade and, tragically, emblems of honest need and grief. We, and April, hear everything, the false notes and the true, making Frank's voice a harsh, rude and tragic symphony.
What stays with me now is the way Yates calls into question words, our ability to twist and bejewel them, to employ words not as a means of communication but as a source of power and imposition, of suffocation. 'I loved the way they talked,' April says of the wayward parents she barely knew. April and Frank inflict the greatest damage on one another in conversation, wielding words as carefully and brutally as ice picks. 'Could you please just stop talking now, before you drive me crazy?' April asks him in the opening pages. Words are the vessels of their fantasies, self-deceptions and manipulations, their 'easy, agreeable lies' perpetrating a fraud so encompassing that when the time comes to speak the truth there are no words left.
'Are you still talking?' April asks Frank in the final act. 'Isn't there any way to stop your talking?' April, into whose inner world we enter only briefly, is no stranger now, in 2009. Her world is reflected in the stories of Alice Munro and Eileen Chang and her choice, when she makes it, to stop inhaling 'gasoline as if it were flowers', comes at us with the force of necessity: to be true to herself, a state of being possible for her in solitude and silence only,  to end her dishonesty regardless of the devastating costs.
Madeleine Thien is the prize-winning author of Simple Recipes and Certainty.



Revolutionary Road