Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road: Not So Revolutionary?

I remember that when I first read Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road I was in many ways impressed by the clean, crisp, prose's conveyance of the vague yet powerful soul-conflicts of his characters, sufficiently so that parts of the book remained quite fresh in my mind years later. Indeed, after reading David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs I quickly found myself thinking of Frank Wheeler's job at Knox Business Machines and of Yates as having offered a masterful treatment of the angst of people in that situation long, long before that particular conversation began to properly emerge.

Yet in the years since I have been more mindful of what seem to be the less compelling, even weaker, aspects of Yates' work, especially since recently coming into contact with the remarks of Yates' biographer, Blake Bailey. As Bailey puts it, Yates here "isn't indicting the suburbs per se," but the "people in that milieu who liked to believe they were better than all this . . . their dumb jobs . . . the banality of their everyday life"--a belief that Yates thought " just wasn't true" and "they'd gotten pretty much exactly what they deserved out of life" in most cases down to the paycheck they were resistant to being defined by--and in his treatment of the Wheelers he showed these "fundamentally self-deceiving, pathetic creatures . . . [f]inding out that" the "romantic things about themselves" that they wanted to believe just "weren't true."

That certainly wasn't what I had got out of the book at the time. Rather, likely because I came to Yates' book with no prior knowledge of the author or the work amid a revival of interest in them largely connected with Sam Mendes' film adaptation (and the reputation Mendes had personally acquired with American Beauty as a poet of suburban discontent), and how I had come across the quotation of Yates' remark that the book was indeed about the "lust for conformity . . . blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price . . . the revolutionary road of 1776 . . . come to something very much like a dead end" with its hint of radicalism, I readily accepted the view that the book was at bottom a critique of suburban life, or at least a particular experience of that life. Thus seeing Yates' presentation of the atomized and emotionally shallow existence of the Wheelers (there is certainly a sense of isolation here, and from the depressing opening theatrical forward a sense that this isn't quite living), I thought of the Wheelers' hazy ideas of going to Paris, and Frank finding his way to some "greater calling" there, as having been a reaction to that; that dissatisfied with the conventional "middle class," married, child-rearing, white collar suburbanite existence they simply reached for the life of an artist, Bohemianism, something along those lines, however little they understood or truly desired that particular thing, simply because it is the only alternative of which they were aware.

However, Bailey's remarks made me rethink that, not least because of how that notion of going to Paris to begin a new life fell apart--Frank doing a piece of actual work and being noticed for it and getting excited and having second thoughts as what seemed to him his "bullshit job" no longer seems so to him, and perhaps no longer so to Yates. How even if this couple is isolated--"trapped" together in their house, without others to talk to or lean on or connect with, with all this means for the combination of emotional poverty they endure with their ability to bear their stresses--Yates never seems to cast a critical eye on that, nor identify this with suburbia and its famously isolating effects to any great degree, as indeed his once remarking that if there is "a theme" in his work he "suspect[s]" that "it is . . . that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy," implying that he sees the predicament he describes as simply universal rather than anything sociologically specific to the suburbs. The result is that Yates appears to be writing not about society or anything in it but that favorite chestnut of the intellectually lazy and misanthropically pessimistic, "human nature," all as, in line with the general tendency of the intellectually lazy and misanthropically pessimistic, not troubling themselves about the variety and complexity of what that nature contains, or why particular circumstances may bring certain aspects of it to the fore rather than others--for instance, in addressing just why "self-deception" of this kind should be so widespread. As a result rather than a factor in the events that unfold suburbia is just the stage on which they act out what they brought onto that stage from before they ever appeared on it in that way aligning with the view that humans are all but engineered to make themselves miserable and destroy themselves when given even the slightest opportunity, and there is nothing that anyone can ever hope to do about that, such that it hardly matters what society is like, or even if it exists at all. Moreover, as Bailey tells the story the details of Yates' biography--his rather heavy weight of baggage about his mother's artistic aspirations and the problems they made for the whole family, himself included, and his own considerable frustrations as a writer not doing too well out of the job (he was at the time he wrote this book teaching to support himself and his family, because his writing couldn't)--and his own not inconsiderable snobbery, with all that means for his sense of his right to sit in judgment on what others "deserve," and his attitude toward others who think they have in themselves what he was never sure he had in himself, if he was perhaps not deluding himself the way Frank did--certainly conduce to this explanation of the book ultimately being about the falsity of people's notions that they might have been something else, something more, in a way that, even as someone normally averse to this kind of biographical explanation of what people write, find very plausible.

But if that is the book's Big Idea--that people are "self-deceiving, pathetic creatures" lying to themselves when they think that life could have had more to offer than dumb jobs and banality, that they aren't defined by their paycheck, that they might "deserve" something more or different--what does that mean for our understanding of the book? Certainly it makes Frank's forgetting about Paris look not like shrinkage from seeking out something more from life but simply his coming to his senses and finding meaning and interest in what he only thought was a "bullshit job" (as well as accepting the practical reality of what another baby on the way meant for the Wheeler household, and the difficulty of uprooting themselves to Paris pursuing vague notions of his becoming a they-did-not-know-what). If so this most conformist of outlooks dooms any argument for the book as a critique of conformity, or of anything else in society--all as it makes Yates' remark about criticizing the "lust for conformity," the dead end of the "revolutionary road" seem an attribution to his narrative of significances it never had which just so happens to fit in tidily with how later people came to look back at post-war suburbia (Yates perhaps sharing their view now, or perhaps just saying that he did so to make his old book seem relevant in a way it otherwise might not seem). Indeed, the view about human self-deception we get here isn't much of a Great Truth on which to build a work of Great Literature, but rather the sneer of a mean, bitter, hate-filled man at all those "self-deceiving, pathetic creatures" which derives from the fact that it is himself he hates and sneers at most because he is the most self-deceiving and pathetic of all. Indeed, I do not think it at all hyperbole to say that this is just a more polished, genteel version of Chuck Palahniuk's loathsome Tyler Durden's swaggering idiot snarl at people who think themselves "a beautiful or unique snowflake" rather than "decaying organic matter." And frankly I don't have anything but contempt for that, such that revisiting Yates I wonder if the nearly forgotten Revolutionary Road was not an overlooked gem recovered from the scrap heap, but a book that, just as Yates seemed quick to think of others, "got pretty much exactly what it deserved," with its recovery from the scrap heap as who-knows-what was left there reflective of the failings of the cultural gatekeepers, who never found a piece of mean-spirited pessimism, misanthropy or elitism they didn't positively adore, and, in line with Yates' deciding that the book was a criticism of the lust for conformity, deployed their ability to make a very great deal out of a very little on its behalf of his book accordingly.