Quote of the Day | May 6, 2008: Walking Paths Laid Out by Other Forces

Richard Yates was a "writer's writer" a/k/a one who never quite makes it into "the permanent, big-money main arena of American literary fashion." He had the misfortune to have written his best book first when Revolutionary Road "lost" the 1962 National Book Award to Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer.

This passage is from Richard Ford's 2000 introduction to Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road:

Over the nearly four decades since Revolutionary Road's publication, commentators have almost always characterized Yates' novel as "bleak" and his vision of Americans and American life in the suburbs as, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, people adrift in "a sad, gray, deathly world." Yates himself, never one to pull a punch, admitted to an interviewer in 1974 that he "meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 . . . our best and bravest revolutionary spirit [perhaps briefly embodied by April Wheeler], had come to something very much like a dead end in the fifties."

And indeed, a citizenry's urge to break away and form a community based on clear ideas of who the citizens are, what they need, and what they're up against is very much the model for correct deportment in Yates' view. Though in Revolutionary Road this is precisely the ideal that the suburbs -- monotonous, anesthetized buffer zones between the two more vital life experiences of the country and the city -- manage to trivialize and contaminate.

Suburbanites themselves seem but hungry, aimless foragers in pursuit not of a better life, but only an easier, less responsible one. None of the characters glimpsed in Revolutionary Road has much of a clue about who it is they are. They, in fact, can't admit it fast or often enough. All are walking paths laid out by forces and authorities other than their own personal senses of right and wrong: Convention, Habit, Disengagement, Mammon, Escape.

"He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive," Yates' narrator remarks caustically about Frank Wheeler. And as her life gets swept along toward the novel's withering climax, April Wheeler, in despair nearly unto death, peers at her neighbor, the feckless Shep Campbell, from within the gloom of a backseat where they've fallen upon one another in a drunken moment of befuddlement and sexual dismay: "Honestly," April says, stating no more than what's obvious. "It's just that I don't know who you are. . . . And even if I did . . . I'm afraid it wouldn't help, because you see I don't know who I am, either."

Tags: Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates, Richard Ford