The Wages of “Maturity”
Revolutionary Road.
by Richard Yates.
Atlantic-Little Brown. 337 pp. $4.75.
Judging from all one reads and hears, there seem to be as many writers tramping around the suburbs these days as there are postmen: for every man carrying in the news, another is sending it out. Since Revolutionary Road is one of the more interesting American novels that has appeared in some time, one might expect it to contain some arresting inversions of its material. But the truth is that its major figure, Frank Wheeler, is still another bright young man who has lost the way and ended up in a New York corporation, where, limp with boredom, he pushes sales correspondence around on his desk. He spends his weekends attempting to build a stone walk or trying to hold his troubled marriage together or lapsing into a mild alcoholic haze. His wife April is still another handsome but frustrated woman—an ex-drama student who is begining to lose her hold. Their two young children are equally familiar; so are almost all of the minor characters, the nondescript house in Connecticut, the office tedium, the suburban anomie. The dust-jacket tells us that Richard Yates spent five years working on this, his first, novel, and since he is a writer of intelligence and imagination, I suspect that he spent a good part of the time asking himself if he could really bring off a book burdened by so much banal typicality. That he has been able to do so is a tribute not only to his talent but to his feeling for the material, to his power—at times, almost obsessive—of identifying with the world of Frank Wheeler. The result is a book that carries the reader along by the very fact of its being so literal and intimate and intensely American. I have a number of quarrels with Revolutionary Road, but have only admiration for the way its author has turned flat, worked-over material into an arrestingly relevant novel.
What makes the book as good as it is, is mainly Yates’s ability to tell the truth—both about the little, summary moments of work and marriage today and—though less clearly—about the larger social issues which the behavior and fate of the Wheelers represent. Passage after passage has the simple, unmistakable ring of authenticity: Frank’s sinking feeling as he returns to his desk on Monday morning, his writhing with self-irony as he nods deferentially at an important executive’s vulgarities, his different poses in order to look masculine or “interesting.” Yates has the novelist’s natural instinct for the nuances by which people give themselves away; he can render Frank’s glib denunciations of the illusions and the sentimentalities of American life as unerringly as he catches Frank demonstrating them. The fights between Frank and April, the long earnest “talks” in which nothing of their real feelings gets communicated, the network of dependency and egotism, guilt and self-righteousness, supportiveness and betrayal, in which the young couple is trapped—all of this Yates catches with remarkable aptness.
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The broader ramifications have much the same immediate truth. Early in the novel, the Wheelers are driving home from an amateur theatrical in which April, along with the rest of the cast, has flopped dismally. Frank consoles himself with the thought: “It simply wasn’t worth feeling bad about. Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs . . . the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”
Much of the story that follows is patient documentation of the contradiction here that Frank tries to live by—one of his characteristics that makes him representative. A nagging concern with one’s “identity” lands most of the young “thinking” people today in the same boat, just as it has become one of the leading themes of postwar fiction: the critical need to locate a self that is independent of one’s daily circumstances. But once one subtracts the effects on the personality of an unsatisfying job and home life—subtracts, that is, all but a few hours of life out of each week—the identity that remains becomes painfully abstract and problematic. So Frank and April both learn—and with disastrous consequences. Frank is also typical of many members of his generation in having to go back seven years to his student days at Columbia to remember who he is, for it was there that he had his last, as well as his first, chance to develop.
The leading fact about Frank is, in a sense, his typicality, for he is made of the promising but unstable human stuff that the culture shapes according to its dominant values. At Columbia he rebels against his middle-class family; he is the World War II veteran, still wound up from his experience, alertly stalking ideas and girls in the streets of Greenwich Village. However, all the while, he is merely enacting the vague tribute the educated middle class pays to intellect and independence; for all real purposes, his rebellion is over by the time he is twenty-three. After graduation, he has married and his wife has gotten pregnant; now bent on behaving “maturely,” so that she will carry the baby, he takes a job at Knox Business Machines. The important thing about the job is that it is dull and undemanding; in that way, he can preserve his “own identity” until he has enough money to go to Europe. But under the familiar banner of “maturity,” the process has now begun by which the Village rebel will turn into a solid consumer and the uncommitted student of the humanities will eventually become a committed salesman of the new computers.
Seven years later he is still with Knox, still doing “the mature thing” by owning a home in the suburbs, and still trying to preserve his identity as one of the thinking, intelligent people. But there is “a faint, chronic fever of bewilderment in his eyes,” his “thinking” is confined largely to self-projections about the sickness and emptiness of American life, and his intelligence is employed mainly in analyzing and manipulating his wife. Now and then he looks sadly at his impressive collection of books “which were supposed to have made all the difference but hadn’t.” When his wife offers him the chance to “find himself while she supports them in Europe, he is more threatened than pleased; the years at Knox have taken their toll and he sees himself in Paris “hunched in an egg-stained bathrobe, on an unmade bed, picking his nose.” What he has really come to want is the more prestigious job that is offered at Knox.
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Over the whole novel broods this sense of incompleteness and attrition, of landscape that has become commercialized without losing its rawness, of young couples whose best possibilities are already years behind them, who have had to rely too much on their marriages, who work at life—as April sees in her moment of truth near the very end—in a way that is “earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong.” “Maturity,” “love,” “morality,” “self-identity”—these are the catchwords of the Wheelers, and, as has been pointed out in recent years, of their World War II generation. But as the novel argues convincingly, these words stand less for viable values than they do for excuses and evasions of failure. With each of these words as a justification, Frank manipulates April to give up the idea of Europe and carry their third child, and then uses the same slogans to detach himself from her predicament in order to concentrate on his new role as a rising young executive. Eventually he makes it to shore as a successful, if completely hollowed-out, huckster of the Madison Avenue vintage. Meanwhile April has given up, has tried too late to abort the baby, and died.
Who is to blame—Frank? April? the failure of both their parents to raise them adequately? the Zeitgeist? modern American life? All of these are implicated in the disaster of the Wheelers, and there is at first glance a satisfying complexity in the moral vision with which Yates distributes the blame. However, it is just here that the novel betrays a certain equivocation and patness of conception that blurs its meaning and dissipates its power. The commentary on the times, both implicitly and explicitly, tries to go beyond the Wheelers’ smug criticism of America’s “drugged and dying culture.” Every so often the son of the competent and awful Mrs. Givings emerges from the state mental hospital to tell the truth about everyone and everything; but his comments on the “hopeless emptiness” of the times are hardly more substantial or illuminating than what we have been hearing from Frank. Most of the explicit social criticism explains too much or too little: its indictment is amorphous and merely irritable, and compromises the powerful commentary implicit in the details.
At the same time, the psychology of the novel has a way of letting the air out of whatever large social protest is being made. Embedded in the narrative are a number of flashbacks that explain why Frank and April behave as they do—why he has problems with masculinity and why she is crippled as a wife and mother. The stress on their supposedly determinative childhoods undercuts the other issues being raised, for in making his tragedy neatly probable, Yates is saying in effect that the Wheelers probably would have failed under the best of circumstances. To write a more meaningful novel about the deadening effects of modern work and marriage, Yates needed characters who could have put up considerably more resistance. As is, Frank and April retain their social significance only to the extent that their early deprivations are typical. And the larger cultural point is obscured: the white-collar man today has a tough time with the problem of masculinity whether or not his father was as overbearingly virile as Frank Wheeler’s; nor do the April Wheelers need to grow up without their parents in order to have serious trouble relating their lives to the demands of their husbands and children. Further, the neat consistency with which the Wheelers’ behavior is shown to betray their emotional problems, the ease with which they are seen through, weakens considerably the impact of their tragedy. Psychology, as Raskolnikov discovered, is a two-edged knife: depended upon too schematically in a novel, it leads the reader to begin to play the same game as the novelist, and it is easy to end up thinking—if only April had found a good psychiatrist in time.
In the end, Revolutionary Road is too obsessive and portentous a novel, too laden with personal meanings of all sorts placed on the frame of a slender and overly simplified story. But it is also an extremely conscious book, and Yates’s ability to see so much in his material, to bring out so much of the truth that lies behind the clich6s about suburbia and the organization man is more important finally than his partial failure to dramatize his characters and ideas effectively. One of his ideas seems particularly interesting. Frank Wheeler is a son of sturdy, hard-working middle-class stock; for all his joking about it, he follows his father’s example of working for Knox and eventually becomes a highly attenuated and slick version of him. April is a daughter of the reckless “golden people” of the 1920’s, cherishing the memory of their glamour and freedom and, in her way, she becomes a coarsened, joyless version of the former aristocracy. In other words, the attrition that marks their life together lies along a greater curve of decline in American life—a thinning out of class vitalities from generation to generation, an ever-diminishing legacy from the national dream of combining hardiness and grace. The revolution invoked by the title has several possible references, but the main point is that its spirit in America is nearing the end of the road.
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