I have mixed feelings about the fact that Richard Yates did not live long enough to see his greatest novel made into a film, especially since the novel itself is about performance and performativity. I'm sad that he wasn't here to get a taste of the wide recognition and praise his work so richly deserves, but I am glad he did not have to witness the pallid, dull melodrama that was made of it. To be honest, I could not even sit through the entirety of this thing. Listen, the performances were good (DiCaprio is perfectly cast as Frank) and the movie captures the time of its setting well, but that is where it ends. The director of this movie seems to have a very superficial understanding of the novel, which I am here mainly to urge upon viewers of the film and for that matter on everyone. Revolutionary Road lost out to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer for The National Book Award in 1962, ironically enough. I enjoyed Percy's novel, but I will not ever read it again, while I return year after year to Yates, whose prose is so fine and perfectly turned that I can think of no other American writer besides Hemingway with whom to profitably compare him. Both writers do brilliantly what novelists today seem to have forgotten how to do, which is to tell first and foremost a riveting story. Both writers do this while at the same time constructing absolutely perfect and multi-dimensioned works of art. Indeed, I had read Revolutionary Road many times before deciding to teach it in a course I designed called "The Problem of Mimesis in Post-1945 American Literature," and when I read it to prepare to teach it, i.e. Read it critically, it was only then that I discovered how minutely and interconnectedly all of its parts enmesh and work, like the movement of a fine watch. Please read this book. It is an unqualified masterpiece, and it is a tragedy that it is not more widely appreciated for what it is.
Review of Revolutionary Road
