≫ PDF Free Revolutionary Road Modern American Fiction Richard Yates 9780413757104 Books

Revolutionary Road Modern American Fiction Richard Yates 9780413757104 Books

Download As PDF : Revolutionary Road Modern American Fiction Richard Yates 9780413757104 Books

Revolutionary Road Modern American Fiction Richard Yates 9780413757104 Books

This was the first book I'd read by Yates but I can see why it made him famous. It seems to be one of the first of its kind to take a serious look at the phoniness of the American suburban dream. Yates was a skilled writer with a keen eye for observation. I was hooked in the first few pages by a chapter told in the third person that generalized about a whole audience's response to a play. It masterfully set the tone for the rest of the book and defined the main characters' principle flaws in a subtle and meaningful way. The rest of the novel is littered with metaphorical imagery that drives home the most jarring aspects of conformity.
The main characters, April and Frank, are somewhat anti-heroes who do some loathsome things but end up being extremely relatable and well-liked. The plot itself is slow but the read is quick and I found myself reading big chunks at a time.
The movie is much slower because it doesn't have the benefit of the characters' inner thoughts. And, though Winslet and DiCaprio do an amazing job of breathing life into some of the tamer written scenes, the movie fails to give a nuanced insight into the characters' motives. Indeed, the narrator is third person omniscient so the reader can see into the hearts and minds of all the characters throughout the story.


Tags : Revolutionary Road (Modern American Fiction) [Richard Yates] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely and brilliantly alive...a masterpiece' Tennessee Williams. 'Easily the best novel I've read this year' Nick Hornby. Hailed as a masterpiece from its first publication,Richard Yates,Revolutionary Road (Modern American Fiction),Methuen Publishing,0413757102,Fiction - Romance,Modern fiction,Romance - General,Fiction

Revolutionary Road Modern American Fiction Richard Yates 9780413757104 Books Reviews

Richard Yates chronicled the American Dream from the inside, as he knew and lived it; he was an American writer. Compared to Chekhov and considered the poor man’s Fitzgerald for his style, Yates received praise from the likes of Andre Dubus, Dorothy Parker, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut and Tennessee Williams, yet sold so few books in his lifetime for him to make a living as a writer.

Revolutionary Road. Frank and April Wheeler do all that society has asked of them. They are middle-class. They buy a house in the burbs. They have children. They are subscribers to the American Dream. Both are conformists. He has a monotonous job, a monotonous commute and she suffocates in taking care of the house and minding the children. They are miserable; they come to loathe one another. They are frustrated failures, unhappy with their lives. The Wheelers are domestic combatants, skilled at verbal and physical abuse. They aspire and they reach for more because they feel entitled, but neither Frank nor April has the will or impetus to effect change. They have a vision, they have a plan that they fail to execute. Their antecedent, Jay Gatsby, had charisma, energy and a romantic imagination in his destructive quest for Daisy Buchanan, and dies a tragic figure, having been blinded by his obsession. Gatsby was murdered in the end, but he was a living suicide inside an unsustainable dream. Death had saved him.

Death does come to Revolutionary Road, but there is no overt tragedy in its wake. A clueless character, a stagnant person remains unchanged. The American Dream is flawed, dead at the end of the street Yates named Revolutionary Road, but the people doing the dreaming were dangerous, dull, and unimaginative. In a word, unending materialism and a lack of self-awareness lead to narcissism and nihilism. Readers today are accustomed to, if not desensitized to, suburban malaise, but the psychological portrait of the Wheelers in Revolutionary Road remains a very uncomfortable and visceral read. Yates paints a portrait of devastation, using simple words and layering the details, page after page, letting them sneak up on the reader.

Easter Parade is a tale told in the same key, except the main characters are the Grimes sisters, Emily and Sarah. Parade is an unhappy story told through brilliant writing that is effortless as it captures four decades of Americana, the one that Norman Rockwell didn’t paint. This is a less violent book, but just as devastating as Revolutionary Road.

Yates wrote from his own life. He did ‘all the right things,’ yet success eluded him. He was married (twice) and had three daughters. Revolutionary Road, his debut novel, was nominated for the National Book Award along with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 but lost to Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. He received a Guggenheim, wrote speeches for RFK, and scraped by with teaching positions and the largesse of friends. All the literary praises and rewards did little for Yates. Yates would experience several shattering mental breakdowns. His one-time student and lifelong supporter and admirer, Richard Price, wrote

Richard Yates was a magnificent wreck, a chaotic and wild-hearted presence, a tall but stooped smoke-cloud of a man, Kennedyesque in dress and manner, gaunt and bearded with hung eyes and a cigarette-slaughtered voice…

Yates died a bitter and sick man in 1992, aged 66, not from a daily 4-pack-a-day cigarette habit that rewarded him with emphysema, or from drink, but from complications arising from a hernia surgery.
Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road is not an easy novel, but it is an important one, and it will give readers a great deal to ponder. Yates offers no simple answers, refuses to preach, and compels readers to think past slogans, cliches, and simplistic moral answers to complicated problems that are peculiarly American.

In an age where artists and entertainers are eager to bring a prior decade to life--think Mad Men--Revolutionary Road is remarkable because Yates wrote it in 1961 and set it a mere five or so years earlier; he writes without the advantage of hindsight, without a sense of how to draw in modern audiences by accentuating details about the past that will keep them glued to their screens or turning their pages. His characters’ world is essentially his own, and given the nature of the conflicts and the tragedies that unfold in the story, his accuracy and perception is remarkable.

Many themes are at work in Revolutionary Road, but perhaps the most important concerns the plight of women in an era where there was no birth control pill, and when marriage literally meant for hundreds of thousands of women imprisonment in a home, often in a suburb (the setting of Yates’ novel), with no intellectual stimulation. Days stretch endlessly as women clean, cook, care for a growing number of children, and wait anxiously for husbands to return from work--often in the family’s only car. For women who dared to buck the status quo, the inevitable demise of their children is the result, Yates suggests. April Wheeler, Yates’ heroine, was abandoned by her parents and suffers significant problems when it comes to trust, love, and creating a mature bond. Mrs. Givings, who refused to be “just” a housewife, is the mother to an insane grown child who is institutionalized after holding both his parents hostage. Incidentally, it is this insane man who utters the truths that neither the Wheelers nor the Givings themselves are capable of articulating, or who are terrified of articulating.

Desperate to escape the mind-numbing routines of domesticity, April pleads with Frank to move to Paris so that he might have the time to read and “find himself” while she takes a job working as an office secretary to make ends meet. The children, she assures Frank, will be enrolled in school. Frank--who habitually tells his wife and everyone else that his job is boring and just that--just a job--finds that when given the opportunity by April to quit and move to Paris, he balks, preferring instead the commute daily into New York, the freedom from the suburbs, and likely not wishing to trade places with his wife. His job is boring, but it gives him status and autonomy, and many chances to move up in the firm.

Yates presents readers with a world not only before the Pill, but before Friedan’s Feminine Mystique., and in so doing, Yates offers a story that is the best of American realism. The themes, the plot, the lack of clear-cut answers, will resonate with readers today who will find Frank and April’s lives and tragedies uncannily familiar in spite of the novel being over half a century old.
This was the first book I'd read by Yates but I can see why it made him famous. It seems to be one of the first of its kind to take a serious look at the phoniness of the American suburban dream. Yates was a skilled writer with a keen eye for observation. I was hooked in the first few pages by a chapter told in the third person that generalized about a whole audience's response to a play. It masterfully set the tone for the rest of the book and defined the main characters' principle flaws in a subtle and meaningful way. The rest of the novel is littered with metaphorical imagery that drives home the most jarring aspects of conformity.
The main characters, April and Frank, are somewhat anti-heroes who do some loathsome things but end up being extremely relatable and well-liked. The plot itself is slow but the read is quick and I found myself reading big chunks at a time.
The movie is much slower because it doesn't have the benefit of the characters' inner thoughts. And, though Winslet and DiCaprio do an amazing job of breathing life into some of the tamer written scenes, the movie fails to give a nuanced insight into the characters' motives. Indeed, the narrator is third person omniscient so the reader can see into the hearts and minds of all the characters throughout the story.