Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road is a novel that has been lauded by critics and adored by other writers, but it has not garnered the same attention it deserves from readers. Sure, readers keep discovering Yates, but he doesn’t get the same kind of name recognition as other American writers like John Updike and John Cheever. But finally a film production of Revolutionary Road will be hitting the big screen this December, and it’s already generating Oscar buzz.
Directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty), and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in their first film together since their blockbuster turn in Titanic, Revolutionary Road the film will delve viewers into Yates’ view of 1950s American suburbia: a veritable wasteland where broken dreams are marked with paving stones. Leo and Kate play Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple with two children who yearn for life beyond the confines of their quaint Connecticut neighborhood and the pedestrian lives around them.
So while a reunion of Leo and Kate will be catnip for many a moviegoer, it may come as a surprise to some that Yates’ world is anything but the Titanic. Fans won’t find Kate and Leo making eyes at one another for long; they’ll find the famous star-crossed lovers ill-fated in a different way: fighting to communicate in a marriage on the rocks.
Author Stewart O’Nan, who wrote one of my favorite books from last year, Last Night at the Lobster, had this to say about Richard Yates in a lengthy essay he wrote recently about Yates and his work:
“It’s his insistence on the blunt reality of failure that drew me to Yates. In my world at the time (and even now), failure was much more common than success, endurance the best that could be hoped for. Family and love were hard and often impossible. In the world I knew, no one was saved by luck or bailed out by coincidence; no understanding lovers or friends or parents or children made the unbearable suddenly pleasant. Fortunes didn’t change, they just followed a track into a dead end and left you there. To find a writer who understood that and didn’t gussy it up with tough-guy irony or drown it in sentimental tears was a revelation. Yates—even in the mid-’80s, when I first read Revolutionary Road—seemed to me a refreshing change from the false, cloying fiction that passed for realism. He still does.”
Yates’ writing is crisp, accomplished and contemporary, and his vision is pretty bleak. It makes me wonder how the film will portray the book, and how audiences will respond. As a librarian, I revel in film adaptations, especially when they bring new readers to a work. If the film does well, and gets some Oscar nominations, perhaps Yates will come back into vogue.
I hear Yates novel The Easter Parade is in production as well. That novel has a great first line: “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.” In other words, more realistic fare from a master American writer. I can’t wait.
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