Revolutionary Road (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Vintage Contemporaries)
by Richard Yates
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard YatesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-11-25
ISBN: 0307454622
Number of pages: 355
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780307454621
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Book Reviews of Revolutionary Road (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Vintage Contemporaries)
Book Review: A painfully accurate portrait
Summary: 5 Stars
Richard Yates' style will wrap its tentacles around your neck and gently squeeze, which is not a great sensation unless you marvel at his skill and perception. His devastating portrait of a young couple with children who yearn for something more than the suburbs and corporate life is both a reaction to the sufficating 1950s and the universal frustrations we all feel because of the limitations of our time and place.Is "growing up" really about compromising our dreams?
Summary of Revolutionary Road (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Vintage Contemporaries)
In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble.With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.
The rediscovery and rejuvenation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership. April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.
Yates's incisive, moving, and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs seem quaintly dated--the early-evening cocktails, Frank's illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn't averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn--and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did years ago. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the exacting cost of chasing the American dream. --Jane Morris, Amazon.co.uk
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