I’ve read “Like Men Betrayed”, (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) James Wood’s consideration of Richard Yates and Revolutionary Road, many times. Besides being one of my favorite pieces of book criticism in recent memory, it fired me up to give the book a closer examination of my own. Despite never having held mid-century novels of domestic anguish in particular regard — especially ones adapted into Sam Mendes movies — something about Wood’s assessment said, “Hey, you really oughta check this one out again.” Not in those words, but still.Wood calls the Revolutionary Road “the decade’s great, terrifying indictment of suburban surrender.” The novel came out in 1961, making “the decade” technically the sixties, but, set in 1955, the novel takes aim at the kind of suburban surrender we think about when we think about fifties America. I grew up in the nineties, which decade enjoyed a psychologically complex relationship with the fifties: never were those white picket fences, high-finned autos, and racist milkmen more viciously pilloried and more ironically beloved. People now regard the fifties as culturally bland, perhaps rightly so on the whole but perhaps wrongly so in the details, or vice versa. Yet I seem to recall feeling the press of a certain cultural blandness in the nineties — a blandness convinced of its own eclecticism — that I definitely don’t today.
But even though I grew up in the suburbs, I never quite became the kind of ineffectually resentful suburb-loathing adolescent you see in the back rows of classrooms. I bore, in fact, no meaningful anti-suburban feelings; while not jazzed as a youngster about having to bike 45 minutes to get to the nearest building that wasn’t a house, I couldn’t interpret the milieu of nearby Seattle as any kind of alternative. The city’s rambling slackers, shambling junkies, and angry kids ecstatic with fandom for unhygenic, unskilled rock bands represented all that then repulsed me, and surely they despised the suburbs, so...
Point being, as I now draw near the age at which many Americans think a freestanding house on a quite street might not maybe be so bad after all in a way, my distaste for the suburbs intensifies each day. I don’t sit around jabbing by Gaulois skyward, pontificating on the intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual graveyard that is the cul-de-sac; I just find my life increasingly taking a shape that gives the suburbs a very, very wide berth. I think about that old Talking Heads line: “This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. How did I get here?” It’s a fair question, though: how did they get there?
Revolutionary Road offers an answer, or at least an illustration, that has to do with pregnancy, passivity, and palliative irony. In their late twenties, central couple Frank and April Wheeler already have two kids and a house, which I’m sure was just about par for the U.S. of 1955 but in 2010 seems almost scandalously premature. April, a housewife, has recently gotten involved with the community theater. Frank, employed in a vague managerial position by a towering entity called Knox Business Machines, believes his job to be just one stop on the way to the even vaguer creative career (“in the humanities”) laying somewhere in his future. As Wood puts it, Frank “prides himself that he takes his job ironically, that he cares nothing for it, and that his real life is elsewhere.”
Clearly not unheard of half a century ago, Frank’s cognitive dissonance-driven posturing has, I would imagine, grown even more common today. It’s one thing to hold a day job and not take it seriously because you’re entertaining visions of yourself as an actor, a painter, a writer; it’s quite another to regard the job as not what you “really” do when you have no idea what that you’d do were its burden lifted. Pushed to the breaking point by the stultifying mediocrity of her surroundings, April, the daughter of absent bohemians jet-setters, pushes through a plan to move the family to Paris. Frank wrings his hands over questions of logistics and ultimate purpose alike. April, in words that would seem flaky if they weren’t the most lucid and forthright ones any character speaks in the entire book, insists that the move offers Frank the very opportunity to learn that purpose, to “find” himself.
Again, I can’t put it any better than Wood does: “Perhaps there is no Frank to find.” Here the novel’s real horror kicks in, the distinctive flavor of horror which springs from the revealed loss of agency. Just as whatever will a horror movie’s doomed cheerleader can’t overpower the machinations of the masked serial killer, Frank’s every action draws him back toward safety and isolation to the dim, repetitive pseudo-pleasures of idle complaints aired over cocktails and plain secretaries banged during the lunch hour. What’s worse, this lacks even the nobility of a Sisyphean struggle. Frank doesn’t actually aspire, in his heart of hearts, to anything beyond this; at the bottom of the abyss lays the humiliating mundanity of his genuine desires.
Throughout the text, you can see Yates giving the stink eye to the newfound American priority of security above all else. His concern is valid; even by the time I was a little kid, I noticed that most of the grown-ups around me seemed nearly insane with a lack of imagination. But I find much more to sweat about in the way he lets his characters’ minor acts of complacency build up until it’s too late. They then must resort to extended acts of elaborate fakery — of theater, not unlike April’s shambolic community production that opens the novel — in hopes of papering over their indiscretions of will. Frank and April have kept this up so long that, as April nakedly articulates in her penultimate appearance, they’ve forgotten who they are.
I realize how clichéd a phrase like “they’ve forgotten who they are” sounds, but Revolutionary Road is perhaps the only novel I’ve read which presents total identity loss as a clear, present, shitlessness-inducing danger — and I’ve read everything by Kobo Abe. Though Frank never really means to go to Paris, he hides in the fog of the notion that he soon will, spreading yet another thick layer of the badigeon of self-delusion into the cracks snaking through his life. You almost can’t blame him; surely this is the first instinct of anyone outwardly gearing up to make a big change. Anyone preparing to do that — myself included — needs to raise a formidable amount of inward-looking vigilance to avoid falling into the same pattern.
Not that I mean to get so terribly heavy. One thing few ever point out about Richard Yates is that he’s damned funny. The reason it goes so unpointed out is probably that his writing’s humor and the horror, both drawn without adulteration from humanity’s awkward expectations and fumbling self-justifications, exist of a piece. Never did I grin without a grimace, or grimace without a grin. At his best, Yates gets seemingly endless mileage from the meeting of his characters’ misshapen, ill-defined ideas and the grim reality that awaits them. Early on the night of April’s wanly disastrous stage debut, Frank, the master of the obsessive, misguided mental rehearsal, envisions
himself rushing home to swing his children laughing in the air, to gulp a cocktail and chatter through an early dinner with his wife; himself driving her to the high school, with her thigh tense and warm under his reassuring hand ("If only I weren’t so nervous, Frank!"); himself sitting spellbound in pride and then rising to join a thunderous ovation as the curtain fell; himself glowing and disheveled, pushing his way through jubilant backstage crowds to claim her first tearful kiss ("Was it really good, darling? Was it really good?"); and then the two of them, stopping for a drink in the admiring company of Shep and Milly Campbell, holding hands under the table while they talked it all out. Nowhere in these plans had he foreseen the weight and shock of reality; nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn’t seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ("Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?"), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into 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 constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.
I don't know. My main reaction to the novel is that I would like to punch Frank Wheeler in the face, and possibly Richard Yates as well.
The glossy numbing rot of tightly circumscribed suburban striving is something that usually interests me, but Yates's relentless contempt for his characters overrode any sympathy I might have had for his themes. It is fine to write about vacuous jerks, but it is overbearing to annotate every encounter, every inner monologue, every f***ing page practically, with authorial contempt for said vacuous jerks (to make double extra certain I know how to feel). Just give them to me bare, and let me figure out for myself whether or not I hate them.
All the novel's action flows from Frank's inner narcissist: it kills his wife, wrecks his kids, scorns his friends, and (constantly, neverendingly) fishes for validation from precisely the cozy vacuity he affects to disdain. Frank is interested in cultivating a praise-garnering personal narrative, not actually extricating himself from the eudemonic atrophy he spends so much time critiquing/ironically dismissing. He doesn't want to be different, because that would involve risk and actual physical separation from the people he condescends to, in which case who would be there to listen to him expound about how different he is? Rather, he wants to gesture at being different while staying right where he is. Best of both worlds there: he gets the safety and predictability of structured banality, and he gets to scoff at the rubes who don't "get it" while those same rubes tell him he's awesome and a rebel.
Navel-gazing men barely notice anyone else, and this indifference is not benign (even moreso in 1955, I suppose). Frank wants credit for empathy, for responsibility, for sophisticated adulthood, but he undertakes not a single action that does not redound to his own ego-fulfillment. Basically, he just takes. His marriage to April becomes an unintentional fait accompli, based on her not wanting him to feel bad, and him having no clue this is going on:
This edifice of innocuous little lies becomes impregnable over time; eventually you are trapped in this thing you loathe, and you barely know how it happened. The difference is that April genuinely loathes it and understands its implications, is in many ways a genuine victim, whereas Frank is just posing.
As to those implications, here is an "ancient man" telling us the novel's Big Important Theme:
So: we choose Structure (tidy communities comprised of tidy houses on tidy streets) over the sloppy churnings of life, and in so doing obliterate the interesting parts of ourselves. We submit to pointless nothing work, anonymity, serial pettiness. Ultimately we begin to mistake this coping mechanism for virtue, i.e. this is a thing we do because it is right and true, not because it eases our angst. We gloss the sacrifices, re-categorize them as choices borne of integrity.
I'm not sure the novel is successful at illuminating the particular ways in which this dynamic manifests, however. Not that they're not there: for Frank, a succession of pats on the head (from his job, his boss, his mistress) stand in for accomplishment. Mrs. Givings confuses activity with purpose. Yates indulges a reverie for nearly every character wherein he or she wrestles with the vague but persistent idea that they've missed something (ugh). And so on. But he seems to want to attribute this state of affairs to the weakness/wickedness of individuals rather than the infrastructure of anodyne self-congratulation that coaxes them into acquiescence.
Posted by: Matt | January 19, 2011 at 07:08 AM