Yesterday I read Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.  This novel is perfect.  Taking his time to set up the characters, and the landscape, the history and the present, he writes an absorbing and moving story of ordinary people in an extraordinarily ordinary situation.  Frank and April Wheeler find themselves, as many do, suddenly grown beyond the age by when they thought their dreams would have been realized and instead, they are where they thought they would never end up.  For April and Frank that place is an ex-urb, a town off in Connecticut, and the place is also the dull job Frank goes to the city to attend to every day, and the place is motherhood where April is not sure she wants to be — and it all just keeps coming. They have changed from the golden children they thought themselves to be at one time into what they are now, miserable and desperate and angry.  As Frank says early in the novel, April has become “the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt restricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile…was as homely as his own sore feet, as his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.” This is exquisite and precise language, and it continues throughout this stunning novel.

Based on what I’d heard of the book and of the movie, I was expecting the novel to be an indictment of the suburbs and of the people who live there but it is not, not completely. This is a very specific story of two people who fail and although their circumstances do not help, it is their own actions and inactions that fail them. They fail for not having imagination and energy big enough to move (figuratively) where they want to go.  They cannot create a life and a space for themselves that will allow them to think and talk and to walk the walk of their big ideas of nonconformity and full engagement with life.

But Yates is not telling a moralistic tale.  He does not pass judgment on any of his characters.  He presents them fully and truthfully but not harshly, instead he treats them as deserving of our attention because they are so human and so vulnerable.  He builds their stories of flawed humanity to perfection: all the pieces fit, bit by bit, and in the end we are not surprised by how it all turns out.  And yet we are surprised because we wanted more for all of the characters in this book;  Yates made us care about April and Frank and their neighbors, and we were hoping against hope for every one of them.

Revolutionary Road is a very real and honest portrait of an American couple. It is not a stark portrait, it is rich and alive and textured, and beautiful.