I’d hoped Revolutionary Road would win the Oscar for Best Picture. That’s not because I was overwhelmed by it. I wasn’t. Sam Mendes has made a moving film, and Kate Winslet puts in a terrific performance. But that’s about all.
Frames: (top and above) Revolutionary Road reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet after a decade.
The reason why I really wanted Revolutionary Road to win (it wasn’t even nominated in the end) was that it might have done something for the reputation of Richard Yates, the novelist (now dead for 17 years) on whose 1961 masterpiece the film is based.
You do know what a successful movie does for the book on which it is based, don’t you? You needn’t go far. Just look at Vikas Swarup and his gripping but forgettable and long-forgotten book, Q&A—now, of course, found in bookstores (if all the copies have not been sold out) as Slumdog Millionaire.
Revolutionary Road was published when Yates was 35. It was his first novel. On the face of it, it is the heart-rending story of how the lives of Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple living in a western Connecticut suburb, messily fall apart.
It is unremittingly, unapologetically bleak and nihilistic, dealing with the themes that are at the heart of all of Yates’ work: delusion, deception, thwarted ambition, claustrophobia, broken dreams and the shards of shattered lives. Now, to tie in with the movie, all of Yates’ work has been re-issued by Vintage in the UK. All the books are available in India.
Revolutionary Road is Yates’ finest novel, although The Easter Parade comes close, but to get a measure of just how fine it is, it needs to be put in context.
Kurt Vonnegut called it “The Great Gatsby of my time”. Richard Ford wrote in 2001 in an influential essay on the 40th anniversary of the novel’s publication: “To invoke it enacts a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees.” And it was the basis on which David Hare said Yates, more than Saul Bellow, John Updike or Philip Roth, “belongs with (F. Scott) Fitzgerald and (Ernest) Hemingway as the three unarguably great American novelists of the 20th century”.
As with all writers whose greatest book is their first, Yates was as much made as unmade by Revolutionary Road. “His later fiction,” the critic James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, outlining a view of Yates that is not quite accepted by his admirers, “was compulsive but not compelling, necessary to him but not to his readers, who would always chase the fire of his first novel in the embers of its successors.”
In spite of that (and it is unfair to forget Yates’ stories, which alone ought to have guaranteed him a place in American letters’ hall of fame), Yates has always had his fans. It’s a heavy hitters’ club: William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, Julian Barnes, Nick Hornby, Richard Ford and Joan Didion are among its card-carrying members.