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.