Revolutionary Road and the Fatal Forty

A ton of spoilers stretch before you, so enter at your own risk!

I have been in mourning since I finished Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road this afternoon.  I am not mourning April’s death or Frank’s decline.  I am not mourning that I have no more book to read.  I am mourning the loss of the book I thought I was reading.

Until the last 40 pages of the novel, I thought I was reading a fiercely feminist book with the inspired approach of following and listening in on the thoughts of the male antagonist instead of the female protagonist.  Wow!  What an incredible and challenging approach!  And how skillfully executed!  Or so I thought.

Revolutionary Road follows Frank and April Wheeler, a married couple, each on the verge of turning 30 and entering the dreaded middle age.  The year is 1955.  Two years before the story begins, the Wheelers moved out to the Connecticut suburbs in a small home on Revolutionary Road.  Frank works in New York City for a large firm that sells calculators and computers.  April is a stay-at-home Mom, taking care of their two children, Jennifer and Michael.  The novel opens on a play about to be performed at the local high school by a group attempting to start a community theater.  April plays the lead, and although her performance starts strong, the play ends as a total embarrassment for all involved.  This performance is the thing that sets the rest of the plot in motion. 

April is profoundly disturbed by the play’s failure, though we do not follow her thoughts to learn what is bothering her.  Instead, we climb into Frank’s head.  And once we are there, we stay there for the bulk of the novel.  It is in following Frank that we discover the two central themes of the story.  The first is masculinity.  Frank is obsessed with his own manhood.  He practices looks in the mirror to try to construct the right masculine image.  My particular favorite example of this (and the examples are legion) is when he reveals that he has practiced his facial expression when striking a match in a dark room to light his cigarette to create the correct look of masculine ruggedness.  In their first argument together, April hits Frank where she knows it will hurt: “And do you know what you are? . . .  You’re disgusting. . . . Look at you and tell me how by any stretch . . . by any stretch of the imagination you can call yourself a man.”  It’s April’s general assault on his manhood that drives Frank into the bed of a typist in his office.  Every time Frank succeeds, he attributes it to his male confidence, and whenever he fails, it is unerringly due to his misgivings about his virility. 

This is what I thought was so brilliant about the novel as I read it.  To put us in the head of this man, to anchor us to his perspective in all his exchanges with April and his coworkers, we are asked to look through him as surely as if the novel had had a first person narrator.  The main character trait that everyone knows him by is that he is a talker, and he talks to himself through the narration in what can feel like non-stop nattering.  He is constantly persuading himself that his actions are justified, unselfish even.  April, meanwhile is seen through this same lens.  She’s icy at times, irrationally moody at others.  The women in the book are entirely other, strange and relatively useless, except when their softness and submissiveness help define a man’s strength.  So Yates has asked the readers to see the mechanisms of Frank’s reasoning (and by extension, the reasoning of all American males who share the same obsession—i.e. all American males) as a nearly insurmountable barrier to April and all other women.  Who knows what April could achieve were she not bound to the house, which she clearly dislikes? 

April’s one bid toward freedom is her attempt to move the family to France, where she will work in the name of giving Frank “time to find himself.”  This plan is the only thing in the book that appears to make April happy or give her any kind of hope.  Of course, Frank fears that being a man of leisure poses two threats.  The first is that he will be a kept man, which means he will be feminized.  The second is that he fears that, like the play that opened the novel, he will experience humiliating defeat if he actually attempts to do something instead of just talking about it.  He marshals all his strength and intellect to derail the move without openly calling it off.  As readers, we watch as April's dream is crushed and the life goes out of her.  Frank, meanwhile, is too elated by his own good fortune to notice April’s plight.  In fact, having prevented the abortion of their third child, ensuring that April has four more years before she can find any kind of employment, Frank decides to begin working late and avoiding home:  “He rather enjoyed having dinner alone in town and taking walks through the city at evening before catching the late train.  It gave him a pleasant sense of independence.”  And the reader can only think of April, bound to the house with no hope of such independence as long as Frank is enjoying his.

So Yates creates this impenetrable barrier around April through the workings of sexism in the middle class life she leads.  She is penned in by Frank’s demands, and for the reader, she is eclipsed and silenced by the constant talking in Frank’s head. 

The second central theme revealed to us, which dovetails with the stifling obsession of masculinity, is the soul-killing nature of American culture.  In a fantastic scene, Yates describes for us the conversations that Frank and April used to have with their best friends, Shep and Milly.  The four of them would denounce the phoniness of their middle class neighbors.  Everyone else didn’t get it.  They were brainless automatons, fixating on insignificant details to avoid thinking about the big things in life: “Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity,” Frank would say.  “They would all agree, and the happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.”   But of course, this position is all talk.  After the failure of the play, Frank tries to strike up a conversation to this same effect and it falls flat.  As April explains in the days following, “everything you said was based on this great premise of ours that we’re somehow very special and superior to the whole thing, and I wanted to say, ‘But we’re not!  Look at us!  We’re just like the people you are talking about!” 

What Yates presents is an incredibly sophisticated and depressing observation about how the culture absorbs us even as we rail against it.  The Wheeler’s can talk of superiority every night over their drinks, but they go through the motions and play by the rules every day.  And here, I thought, was where the brilliance of the title came in.  Revolutionary sounds like it describes the young, idealistic Wheelers who rail against the machinery, but it also simply means to go round in circles, to revolve around a single axis, like a wheel.  The Wheelers wheeled around in their endless revolution, going nowhere.  Talk about dark.

Not only, then, is April fenced in by the culture’s screwed up sexual politics, but she is caught in the inescapable machinery that surrounds us all as well.  This is the brave book I thought I was reading, and this is the brave book whose passing I mourned when I reached the end of the novel.

Only thrice before the ending do we leave Frank’s perspective.  Twice we enter Shep’s view, primarily it seems to reinforce the world Frank has presented to us.  Shep is every bit concerned about his masculinity and what proper femininity is like—and April is the ultimate woman to him.  Shep thinks he loves her, but he seems about as concerned for her happiness and her thoughts as Frank does.  The third time, we are in Mrs. Givings's mind to help set up the subplot with her son John.  It is only at the end that we get inside April’s head, and I was very excited when I realized what was happening.  We’d finally get to hear about her own thoughts, what she wanted, what she felt. 

What we get is a very controlled and well behaved woman who tells us very little.  She tidies everything up for everyone and sets things in order before going to the bathroom to perform the late-term abortion that she knows might kill her.  No reasoning about the troubles she faced.  Nothing about her desire not to be bound to the house and her sole role as mother.  No rage.  In fact, while she knows she doesn’t love Frank, she realizes that she doesn’t hate him:  “How could anyone hate him?  He was—well, he was Frank.”

Oh dear.  That’s when I knew the wheels were coming off the bus of my analysis.  How could anyone hate him?  He behaved abhorrently!  I hated him.  He sabotaged the dreams of the woman he claimed to love and felt self-righteous as he did it!  He forced her into a corner and then complained that he was the victim!  And here, in her moment to speak up, she excuses him because, well, he was Frank.  Essentially, she says, boys will be boys.  Isn’t he just a big kid who doesn’t mean any harm even if he wreaks it everywhere he goes?

As if that weren’t enough, Frank is devastated by April’s death.  We are exiled from his mind after his first night of mourning, so we never hear him talk to himself about it and reason things out they way he has done throughout the book.  Everyone feels sorry for him and the book takes on the feeling of a tragic tale of love and missed opportunities.  And here’s the kicker:  when Shep recounts how Frank looks months after April’s death, he describes Frank using all the phrases of emasculation that have peppered the book up to this point!  Without April’s femaleness, Frank loses his maleness and becomes a mild guy who has a therapist and talks about his work—everything Frank has hated.  In short, the book aligns itself with the crap Frank has been filling our ears and eyes with since the book started, crap that I thought we were supposed to see through.   I thought Yates and his book were opposed to the sexist culture that smothered April, and while I still think that is the case to a very minor extent, all textual evidence in the last 40 pages suggest that the books believes the crisis of masculinity faced by young American men is a real danger.  Our last image in the novel is Mrs. Givings yammering on in meaningless banter as her husband, the stoic Mr. Givings, turns down his hearing aid to silence her.

Women fare horribly in this novel.  Only April is respected by anyone in the book.  Milly, Mrs. Givings, Maureen, Norma—they are all held up for ridicule and dismissed for their femininity.  As John Givings says to Frank, “I like your girl, Wheeler. . . . I get the feeling she’s female.  You know what the difference between female and feminine is?  Huh?  Well, here’s a hint: a feminine woman never laughs out loud and always shaves her armpits.  Old Helen in there is feminine as hell. I’ve only met about half a dozen females in my life, and I think you got one of them here.”  The other women in the book are feminine, but not female.  Only April has the mystical quality that is female, but whatever that is, all it seems to do is make her a martyr whose death everyone feels responsible for.

It is not fair to criticize a book for not being the book you wanted it to be.  Yates is a fantastic writer who does not shy away from describing the meat of a confrontation or a problem.  He breaks down Frank’s thoughts in startlingly clear terms, like a high-speed film being played back in slow motion.  He is observant, and smart, and daring in his tale-telling.  And up to the last 40 pages, I was ready to declare this book one of my top favorites.  Then everything came crashing down, and in the aftermath I have a detached admiration for Yates’s ability and a vague distaste for his sexual politics and his view of the world as put forth in Revolutionary Road.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is a wonderful novel that wears its heart and meaning on its sleeve.  It has everything you could want: a unique and lively setting that shapes the story, strongly drawn characters who propel the plot, and a storyline that moves crisply but not blindly to its culmination.  This is another book I am glad to have had the opportunity and reason to reread as an adult.

On the Run

Early in Rabbit, Run, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is watching the Mickey Mouse Club with his wife when Jimmie, the adult on the show, sings “Proverbs, proverbs, they’re so true . . . proverbs tell us what to do.”  The proverb he addresses is Know Thyself.  “God gives to each one of us a special talent,” he says. “God wants some of us to be scientists, some of us to become artists, some of us to become firemen and doctors and trapeze artists.  And he gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them.  We must work, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself.  Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them.  That’s the way to be happy.”  Harry claims that his interest in watching the segment is primarily for professional reasons, since Jimmie models excellent salesmanship, but the fact is Harry is desperately looking for some way to be happy.  At a mere 26 years, he calls himself an old man.  He can’t stand his apartment, his pregnant wife, his sales job, or anything else that fills his day.  It is shortly after listening to Jimmie that Harry, without premeditation, hops into the family car and starts the titular running, but whether he is running toward anything or just running away from everything is never made clear.

At first glance, Rabbit, Run seems to be about the failings of middle class family life in America, a topic that has had traction since at least the 1930s (I am thinking of O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra in particular), but which the ‘50s seems to have brought to a foreground.  But Rabbit is such a particular character, that I think that Updike’s novel speaks less to a general concern about American life and more to a specific sensibility.  To clarify, the novel is most certainly concerned with America and what it is to be American.  Rabbit likes Jimmie’s wink at the end of his speech because it “admit[s] it’s all a fraud but, what the hell, mak[es] it likable. . . . Fraud makes the world go round.  The base of our economy.”  When Rabbit first drives off, he feels alien from the people at a rest stop, which gets him to thinking: “He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same.  He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?”  In talking to Ruth, the woman who is to become his lover, he says, “You’re an American,” to which she responds, “How? I could just as easy be Mexican.”  Rabbit is struggling with what is America and what it means to be American, and in some respects, the book itself is asking these questions, but the character of Rabbit looms so large that these general questions about national identity are eclipsed by him.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is kind of an ass.  He’s certainly not the kind of guy I’d like to hang out with for any length of time.  I enjoyed his place as protagonist for the first fifth of the novel, until he hooked up with Ruth in Brewer.  Until that point, I was only disappointed by the portrayal of Rabbit’s wife, Janice, as a sluggish, uninteresting lush.  She seems to be the main reason Rabbit runs, and I thought her character was given short shrift.  It wasn’t clear to me if that choice was made by Updike because he was staying in Rabbit’s head or because he wanted to give Rabbit an easy excuse to beat feet.  After he takes Ruth back to her apartment, Rabbit seems downright creepy.  I kept wondering why Ruth didn’t call it off completely, why she tolerated his behavior at all.  From there, the sexism in the book becomes increasingly uncomfortable for me.  Ruth is described as having a “one-eyed woman’s mind.”  Eccles, the Episcopalian minister who tries to get Rabbit to return to Janice, is said to have “womanish excitement.”  Rabbit feels aroused by Lucy, Eccles wife, because he feels safely “dominant” with her.   He likes being around her because he feels in charge, and notes that there is “something sexed in her stillness in the church, in her obedience to its man-centered, rigid procedure.”   The worst is of course the sexual encounter that follow upon a bad date that Rabbit has with Ruth.  Jealous of her past relationship and recent flirting with Ronnie Harrison, Rabbit demands a blow job to make things right.  Oral sex is presented as a whore’s activity, and since Ruth has lived to some extent on the exchange of money for sex, Rabbit is fascinated with her past as a “hooer.”  Ruth is resistant to do it only because it is clear that Rabbit wants it in order to punish Ruth because “I didn’t like the way you acted tonight.”  He tells her, “Don’t be smart.  Listen. Tonight you turned against me. I need to see you on your knees.  I need you to – do it.”  By this point I found the guy pretty intolerable, but I didn’t know how to react, because I didn’t know the spirit in which Updike presented his protagonist. 

An author’s intent is a funny thing.  We know that art exists outside of the artist and that a thing created is not bound by the intentions of its creator.  An author intending to make one point could very well end up making its opposite.  Nevertheless, the relationship between an author and his or her reader is a sacred thing.  We imagine that having lunch with our favorite authors would be not only a pleasure for us but an utter delight for them as well.  So I can read about any number of wretched people doing wretched things and holding wretched positions as long as I know the author shares my feelings of wretchedness.  But here I was, mid-book, without any clue as to how to interpret Rabbit and his behavior.  On the one hand, I didn’t see how any author could root for this guy, but there was a persistent theme of sexism, and some great authors have held some pretty reprehensible notions.  I knew that Updike had written not one, but three other novels with Rabbit.  Clearly not only did Updike like spending time with this guy but plenty of readers did too.  I wanted to run to the internet and see what was known about the author’s intent, but I didn’t want any of the plot spoiled, so I held off.  I held out hope that it would be made clear to me as the novel unfolded. 

Harry didn’t get better.  While characters like Ruth, Eccles, Lucy, and Janice’s mother responded to Harry favorably, responding to his energy, his life, and his desire to keep on fighting, it became clear that nothing about Harry was heroic.  Only in his actions as a father to his son Nelson was Harry ever likable.  As the novel drew to a close, I had great respect for Updike’s writing, and I enjoyed the novel, even though I was not smitten with it.  Something was scratching at my mind about the character and his relentless desire to move on, his selfish behavior and unwillingness to deal with the facts of his life.  It wasn’t until I was reading about the novel online afterwards that I read the thing that made it fall into place for me:  Updike had written the novel, in some ways, as a response to Kerouac’s On the Road, to show the real-life fallout of the family man who takes off without warning to travel the country, the broken hearts and the inevitable slinking back of the traveler. 

That’s who Harry reminded me of: Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.  The main song in On the Road is movement, the desire to keep running.  Harry shares this affliction without the philosophical (such as it is) foundation.  Here is a man who wanders instead of stopping to Know Himself.  He wants the world to bend to him, to work to understand him, without offering to do the same in return.  He is an aging sports hero who’s god-given talent on the basketball court is no longer applicable.  With no ball in his hand, all he can do is run the court of life, and running is all he enjoys doing.  He “doesn’t like people who manage things.  He likes things to happen of themselves.”  But of course the advice he was given long ago by his mentor Jimmie is that he must “work to develop” things.  Harry childishly mistakes Living for Himself for Knowing Himself, mistakes moving for searching.  And as the novel ends with another turn of the screw in the relationships surrounding him, Rabbit ends doing what he always does: running.  Updike presents the situation with awareness, however, whereas Kerouac, as I pointed out in my earlier post, does not. 

I can’t say this is one of my favorite books on the list, but I do have a respect and appreciation for it, and I am very glad to have read it.

John Barth's X Factor

As I’ve noted in previous posts, I have a job that has expected and unexpected downtime on a regular basis, so I bring whatever book I am currently reading with me nearly everywhere I go.  As way of small conversation, I get asked almost daily what I’m reading, what it’s about, how I like it.  The responses to my answers concerning John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor have been quite amusing.  When I read the title and hold up the book to reveal its cover, which has a colored wood-carving-style illustration of a man in colonial dress and a tri-cornered hat reclining under a tree with a sack of tobacco, an opened book, and a long-stemmed pipe, the most common reaction is a confused, panic look that tells me they don’t know if they should respond with sympathy, horror, or excitement.  Then as I explain that it’s a novel from 1960 set in England and Colonial America at the end of the 17^th century about a 30-year-old virgin trying to find his claim to fame as the Poet Laureate of Maryland and all the misadventures he has, the confused look only gets more desperate.  Then I add that it is written in the style of 18^th century novels like the ones Henry Fielding wrote.   Oh.  Wow.  How quickly can we change topics, their eyes plead. 

No matter how much I effused about how fantastic the book is, I could not make anyone interested in reading the book much less eager to find out what makes the book so brilliant.

The Sot-Weed Factor is nothing short of amazing.  From the construction of the sentences to the tangling and untangling of the grand arc of the plot, John Barth does everything right.  It is a book that is intelligent, fun, bawdy, insightful, wandering, focused, and a joy to get lost in.  The choice to use the language and structure of the 18^th century novel may seem like a gimmick at first, but the style is in fact critical to the feel and thrust of the novel.  The narrator, though not actually a character in the novel, becomes essentially that, and it is impossible to separate the tone and presentation from the substance of the novel.  I could not imagine this story being told in any other way.  To use 20^th century language and sensibility to render the tale would be to make the world created at odds with our relationship to it as readers.  Barth employs instead an immersion technique.  When I think of the breadth of the story and Barth’s commitment to understanding the language, the sentence structures, the idioms, and the style of writing he is imitating, I am awestruck, even more so when I realize that he has managed to make the style his own.  If the plot and substance were nothing more than hollow playthings, I would be in love with this book.

But the plot and substance are as dazzling as the prose.  Not only does Barth twist and turn the plot, mercilessly torture and tickle his characters, but he does so with a sense of thematic purpose.  In his introduction to the novel, written 26 years after the novel was published, Barth notes that the theme of his grand opus is innocence: 

I came to understand that innocence, not nihilism, was my real theme, and had been all along, though I’d been too innocent myself to realize that fact.  More particularly, I came to appreciate what I have called the ‘tragic view’ of innocence: that it is, or can become, dangerous, even culpable; that where it is prolonged or artificially sustained, it becomes arrested development, potentially disastrous to the innocent himself and to bystanders innocent or otherwise; that what is to be valued, in nations as well as in individuals, is not innocence but wise experience.

But I add to Barth’s evaluation my own: that this book is about identity, who we are, and how we know ourselves.

I could point out dozens of recurring themes and tropes in the novel, but like tributaries feeding a raging river, they all trickle back to the question of identity. 

For example, there is the theme of storytelling throughout the novel.  Everyone Ebenezer (our protagonist) encounters has a story to relate to him.  In fact, at times the plot feels like a string of short stories.  Through these stories, Ebenezer comes to understand how the world works, as he travels down the road from innocence to wise experience, and who he is in relation to all these others.  The stories are filled with truths and lies as everyone attempts to define themselves and their place in the world, even if only to advantage themselves or manipulate poor Ebenezer.  There is an hilarious scene in the first quarter of the novel, in which Eben, stuck in a stable with no pants and covered in his own shit, tries to figure out how to clean himself.  A man of learning, he decides to lean on the brilliant minds that came before him, searching the annals of literature for a solution to his problem.  It is a ridiculous and beautiful pursuit that ends with him finding no real-life application of his literary predecessors.  But it is precisely this sort of real-life knowledge that comes from the stories he gets from his fellow travelers.  In the end, Ebenezer is right to search through previous human experience, but he goes to the wrong source.  And every story he encounters and tucks away helps him to understand himself and his relationship to the world.  Experience is self-knowledge.

There are aphorisms; discussion of cosmophilism; a backdrop of political intrigue, revolutions and opium trafficking; a look into twins; the power and ramifications of signing your name; disguises and stolen identities; slavery and indentured servitude; laws and manipulative power—dozens of thematic variations that play like individual instruments in the creation of a grand concerto.  For the analytical reader, there is so much to feast upon, so many connections to make, and as much as I would like to lay out everything I discovered here, I will let you do the discovering for yourself.  But that can only happen if you pick up the book and take the journey yourself.  If you do, you won’t regret it.

The Music Falters - Another Installment in the Dance to the Music of Time

First off, let me welcome you to the 1960’s!  This journey began back in 1923, and we are finally cutting into the 5th decade.  Ironically, our first step forward is a step backward as we return to number 39 on our list, the twelve-volume work by Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time. 

My editions of A Dance to the Music of Time comes in four volumes, each volume titled as a “movement,” as in a symphonic work.  This format naturally gathers the books into four sets of three.  As I was well into Book V, however, it seemed to me that the books might want to be three sets of four, for it feels like Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant is the beginning of something new.  The first of the two factors that give it that feeling is the opening scene of a bombed-out pub.  The war, looming in the background of At Lady Molly’s, has struck London at last.  Of course, the entire story is told as memories spurred on by that opening scene, so the war is held at bay for at least one more novel, but the faded scene of destruction colors the whole of the activity that follows it.  The second factor is the postponing of most of the familiar story lines that we have followed thus far in favor of introducing us to new characters.  Widmerpool makes only the briefest of appearances; Templer is absent entirely, as are his sister Jean and his ex-wife Mona; Quiggin is nowhere to be seen and Members pops in for one short scene.  We spend more time with the Tollands, but mostly with characters we missed out on in previous novels.  All of this gives the impression that Powell is setting the stage for some new events to unfold in the upcoming novels.

Unfortunately, I found Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, in spite of its fantastic title, to be one of the least interesting entries in the series.  It felt like it had a lot of potential to make great connections, but finally failed to do so.  The big political event, for example, that places us in time is the abdication of Edward VII in 1936.  This idea of abdication was hinted at in other relationships too, as in Maclintick and his wife, and Moreland’s potential abdication of his responsibilities toward Matilda.  As I looked about for more thematic connections, I was left holding a handful of ideas without any real textual evidence to bind them together.  More than abdication, Powell is looking at the institution of marriage and the pressures it places on the people at its center—which is a topic that Powell has already plumbed in previous novels.

Another theme seemed to be the collision of the old with the new, as emblematized by the titular restaurant: 

The name Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant offered one of those unequivocal blendings of disparate elements of the imagination which suggest a whole new state of mind or way of life.  The idea of Casanova giving his name to a Chinese restaurant linked not only the East with the West, the present with the past, but also, more parochially, suggested by its own incongruity an immensely suitable place for all of us to have dinner that night.

I saw traces of this theme in the weakening of Jeavons and the passing of St. John Clare, as well as the way that local deaths and events were overshadowed by the looming crisis in Europe.  But like the idea of abdication, these connections seem to be more in my mind than textually grounded in any thorough way.  And like his handling of marriage, Powell has been dealing with these clashes from the beginning of the series, so again there is not much new here.  I am perhaps asking too much of the novel to draw out these connections and to play with these themes.  Presumably the novel does precisely what Powell wants it to do.  I was just left a little flat when it was all said and done.

The novel is of course excellently written and the characters are as compelling as always, but the trend of each novel being better than the last in the series has faltered here.  I expect that it has done so to introduce new characters and complications to be mined in the novels still to come.  Only time will tell.  I’ll pick up with the sixth book in the series, The Kindly Ones, after another seven novels, when I reach 1962.