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Revolutionary Road

By Richard Yates

(335)

| Others | 9780307454782

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Book Description

The rediscovery and rejuvenation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership. April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosContinue

Critics

Revolutionary road

New York, 1955. Frank ed April Wheeler sono una giovane coppia: vivono in una villetta a Revolutionary Hill, un quartiere nella periferia della città. Si sono conosciuti quando April studiava per diventare attrice e Frank era un giovane di belle sper ... (read full critics)

mangialibri published on Fri, 17 Feb 2012

Scene da un matrimonio

"Revolutionary Road" è un classico con potenza premonitrice. Racconta la storia di una coppia annoiata e ordinariamente infelice. Fino alla tragedia finale di Wanda Marra Una coppia borghese, i Wheeler, composta da Frank, impiegato velleitario, annoi ... (read full critics)

railibro published on Thu, 16 Feb 2012

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24 Reviews

6 people find this helpful

A beautiful book, though I have some trepidation about using the word "beautiful" to describe a novel that makes you never want to fall in love--or have anyone fall in love with you--again.
I wouldn't call it cruel or grim, any more than a mirror is cruel or grim when it surprises you with a r ... (continue)

A beautiful book, though I have some trepidation about using the word "beautiful" to describe a novel that makes you never want to fall in love--or have anyone fall in love with you--again.
I wouldn't call it cruel or grim, any more than a mirror is cruel or grim when it surprises you with a reflection that bears no resemblance, none, to the image you crafted of yourself. Or worse, with the gaze of someone who has caught you in the act of trying out an expression for their benefit. It's a book not so much about dreams betrayed as dreams misdreamed, doomed from the start because they rely on the notion that other people will behave like the shadow puppets of your imagination, whereas other people tend to be terribly three-dimensional, ripping through the screen, refusing to mouth back the words you scripted for them. Each of the characters is left aghast by the pitiful, inevitable gap between reality and fantasy, and in their flailing attempts to tweak and tug first one and then the other into some congruous shape, they do violence to both. And without being particularly blind or stupid; I'd venture it's pretty hard for any honest reader to come out feeling superior. In part because Yates is there cradling it all like a pietà.
By the bye, I think this is a very feminist novel.

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Biscia said on May 31, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

3 people find this helpful

I love you when you're nice

"Just happened to feel like it, I guess." (...) She just happened to feel like it. Wasn't that, after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?
"I love you when you're nice," she'd told him once, before they were marr ... (continue)

"Just happened to feel like it, I guess." (...) She just happened to feel like it. Wasn't that, after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?
"I love you when you're nice," she'd told him once, before they were married , and it had made him furious.
"Don't say that. Christ's sake, you don't 'love' people when they're 'nice'. Don't you see that's the same as saying 'What's in it for me?'Look. You either love me or you don't, and you're going to have to make up your mind."
Somehow managed to put him forever on the defensive, who loved him when he was nice, who lived according to what she happenend to feel like doing and who might at any time - this was the hell of it - who might at any time of day or night just happen to feel like leaving him.
Bel romanzo, di quelli forti, introspettivi, che ti catapultano nella realtà che raccontano. Le questioni affrontate girano attorno al problema del benessere, dell'ipocrisia, della mediocrità e del conformismo: una giovane coppia americana incarna la medio borghesia: villetta fuori città, immaturità nascosta dalla rispettabilità, due bimbi, giardino, velleità artistiche di lei, lui lavoro noioso ma che dà da mangiare, amicizie poche e che non impegnino. Spunti culturali, vivacità mentale, capacità d'iniziativa assenti. Una lieve depressione li avvolge, trovano conforto nella critica pur sapendo che se li avvolge il nulla, è perchè lo incarnano anche loro ("Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity." The happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.).
Let's have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let's all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality - Daddy's a great man because he makes a living, Mummy's great woman because she's stuck by Daddy all these years - and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we'll get busy and pretend never happenend.
Un piccolo sobbalzo di vita, e decidono di andare a vivere in Europa. Questo miraggio riporta in vita April e Frank, per poco, prima di soccombere nuovamente di fronte a normali avvenimenti. Il finale non dà speranze.
Lo scontento, la depressione, la noia non sono fattori esterni, nascono e vivono in noi. Let us stop, once and for all, the menacing crisis that represents the tragedy of not being willing to overcome it, scriveva Einstein. Con quanta ragione!

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Giulia Irene said on Aug 13, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

3 people find this helpful

Kate Winslet won her Oscar for her role as Hanna Schmitz in "The Reader", but I think she really aced it in "Revolutionary Road" as April Wheeler, the frustrated, disenchanted and vulnerable suburban housewife. She literally steals the show with her powerful and stunning performance that would leav ... (continue)

Kate Winslet won her Oscar for her role as Hanna Schmitz in "The Reader", but I think she really aced it in "Revolutionary Road" as April Wheeler, the frustrated, disenchanted and vulnerable suburban housewife. She literally steals the show with her powerful and stunning performance that would leave her audience with a broken heart.
Many film critics said that the film does not do justice to Richard Yates' novel, which has become a classic. I saw the movie first and was so shaken by the crisp and impassioned dialogues that I had to read the book in order to savour the lines which are nothing short of masterpieces.
Set in 1955, the story is about the couple Frank and April Wheeler who led a quiet but unsatisfying middle-class life with their two children in suburban New York. April who could no longer bear the "hopeless emptiness" of the suburbia, wanted the whole family to take off and move to Paris. It brought all the underlying problems in this marriage to the surface and led the couple to a path of no return.
Why this book has become a classic is exactly its brilliant demonstration of the weakness and foibles of human beings - that we are so selfish, egotistic, unrealistic and full of excuse when things do not turn out the way we want them to be. If the story and characters were set in the present day, they would still be very true.
"It's as if everybody'd made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception," said Frank Wheeler, talking about how suffocating the suburban life was and that people like him should deserve a more noble life. But weren't both he and April deceiving themselves? They thought that they were in a league of their own, but in what ways were they better than their neighbours? At least their neighbours wouldn't take off without a plan. I think that's why I don't give this book 4 stars because I just don't like the characters. You just wouldn't sympathise with April or feel for her because what she did was so reckless and foolish.
But still, the book is worth reading as the dialogues are superb. I kept on re-reading a few exchanges between Frank and April, and those between them and their mentally-ill neighbour John Givings, because they really hit the nail on the head.
For example, what John told Frank about jobs is so true: "Interesting? ... You worry about whether a job is 'interesting' or not? ... You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like ... Anybody comes along and says 'Whaddya do it for?' you can be pretty sure he's on a four-hour pass from the State funny-farm ..." Don't always say you would quit a job because it's not interesting if you need the job for a living - just stick with it.
And what April said about herself is in fact what I have been telling myself unrealistically all these years: "I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere ... people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time ... and I always imagined that when I did find them I 'd suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them ..." Well, to be exact, I have been telling myself those first few lines - I know those golden people exist - but I definitely am not one of them, and I'd better live with it.
I think what I have learned from this book is that you have to know who you are, know where you stand, and be true to yourself. We can never pretend to be someone we are not. It will lead us nowhere and we will never be happy.
"Revolutionary Road" is a semi-autobiography of Richard Yates and his wife in the 1950s. The book was first released in 1961, but it became famous only after Yates died alone in a desolate apartment in 1992. This added a shred of sadness to the already tragic story.

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Tracy W said on Mar 3, 2009 | 1 feedback

1 person find this helpful

The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accomodate a tragedy.

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Rami said on Mar 23, 2012 | Add your feedback

I bought this book when the movie first came out. Then I started reading it, but it made me depressed and feel hopeless about human nature. I am sure it is an excellent book on protraying the relationship of a married couple. Somehow I do not think I am mature enough to understand the bitter and sou ... (continue)

I bought this book when the movie first came out. Then I started reading it, but it made me depressed and feel hopeless about human nature. I am sure it is an excellent book on protraying the relationship of a married couple. Somehow I do not think I am mature enough to understand the bitter and sour taste of life... I watched the movie, which was pretty impressive. Both Winslet and DiCaprio are my favourite actor/actress. Again, the movie made me feel heavy and sad.

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myself0826 said on Mar 2, 2012 | Add your feedback

Make you feel bad book. It reflects the frustrations that we ordinary people have, the velleities of being somehow different, better than the others, and it gets the point, painfully, mercilessly, brutally. I was glad when I could place it back on the shelf. Life is hard all right, but I like to thi ... (continue)

Make you feel bad book. It reflects the frustrations that we ordinary people have, the velleities of being somehow different, better than the others, and it gets the point, painfully, mercilessly, brutally. I was glad when I could place it back on the shelf. Life is hard all right, but I like to think it is not quite as void as the author seems to present it. There is no touch of humor or irony, without which we can very well be lost in a valley of tears. Yes, no humor, characters take themselves seriously, beyond that point where they are not credible anymore.

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minomataio said on Feb 24, 2012 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback