The Unmagnificent Lives of Adults

On Richard Yates's "Revolutionary Road" and "The Easter Parade"

Suburbia, Photo by White.Rainforest ™︎ ∙ 易雨白林. on Unsplash

Reading the novels of Richard Yates, one is tempted to think: We used to be a proper country. Properly fucking smashed! The American midcentury that weird racists want to RETVRN to was sloshed from noon on; at least two martinis with lunch (often with a cup of coffee, which made me realize that the espresso martini could’ve singlehandedly kept a recession at bay if it were introduced in the mid 1960s – just imagine the productive energy!), a beer when you get home, cocktail hour with whatever your wife has prepped (more martinis?), a sherry with dinner, whiskey on the rocks till you pass out in bed. If you’re meeting friends, throw some driving in there between the beer and cocktails, drink till someone starts feeling sick, and then lock in for the drive home. If you tried to play a drinking game with Richard Yates’s books and sipped every time a character thought of a drink or took one, you’d be seeing double before long; if you tried to actually match their pace drink for drink, you might end up in the hospital. I’m still in jury duty, though, and the sign says NO ALCOHOL OR INTOXICANTS when you come in, so I did not hazard a try at drinking at Richard Yates’s pace. Instead I just burned through a reread of Yates’s first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961) and a first reading of what’s considered his late career masterpiece, The Easter Parade (1976), thanks to the tip from longtime friend of the newsletter Anthony M. (You too can jump my reading queue by becoming a paid subscriber!) If you have the means, court ordered downtime or no (these places are not the paragons of efficiency time-wise, and you can’t use your phone until the official break), I would highly recommend reading both, not only because both are excellent novels, but you can also see what exactly happens to someone when they write something as good as Revolutionary Road and don’t become justifiably revered as one of the greatest writers of their time.

1989 Reissue cover that Yates hated

Revolutionary Road may be the most remarkable American debut novel of the 20th century, likely only matched by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.¹ To write something as completely put together and perfectly formed as Revolutionary Road and have it out there as your first book is probably a curse, as you will never ever live up to that standard again. Even if he never wrote anything up to that level again, he deserved lifelong fame, a cushy professorial gig, and legions of devotees all from this one book. As Lazlo Krasznahorkai once said of Dostoyevsky (and some other “holy” artists: “If you proved, just once, with a work that you are a genius, after that, in my eyes, you are free. You can make shit. You will still remain absolutely the same holy person, and that shit is sacred shit, because having crossed this border, this person is invulnerable.” Richard Yates crossed that border with Revolutionary Road, but it wasn’t till after his death that he really got any kind of cachet,² and I’d still say he doesn’t get enough shine, even after the 2008 film adaptation and various reissues of his work. One could argue that his bleak view of American life could never be popular, or maybe that his characters’ middle-class milieu would always be overlooked; after all, The Great Gatsby is nearly as bleak in the end as Revolutionary Road, but it’s about rich people. Yates was also, like John Williams, a writer slightly out of step with his time, writing quietly realistic dramas through the wild and wooly postmodern sixties and seventies; he wouldn’t represent any distinct era in a survey of American fiction, as there’s no meta-trickery, no unreliable narrator, no experimental ‘play,’ just one sonorous sentence laid next to another until you have a book. (An anti-style if you will, certainly in line with modernist realism but not delving into stream of consciousness or other narrative dislocutions.) Revolutionary Road sits instead with the eternals, belonging to no special time, just a clear-eyed view of an essentially American paucity of the spirit.