Revolutionary Road

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How amazing is this book? Why isn't it better known? Have you read anything elso by him?

― Moti Bahat, Friday, 26 March 2004 18:06 (twenty-one years ago)

I went through a phase w. this book. it was quite stunning when I read it a while back, I wonder if the anti-sentimentalist romantic I am now would still like it. crazy-paved deus ex machina, as I remember.

― cozen (Cozen), Friday, 26 March 2004 19:19 (twenty-one years ago)

I read it last year. Abso-fucking-lutely brilliant. May be better than Scott Fitzgerald. Depressing as hell though.

Anyone read The Easter Parade? I've been thnking of picking that one up.

― LondonLee (LondonLee), Friday, 26 March 2004 19:32 (twenty-one years ago)

'crazy-paved deus ex machina' = 'ugh it just got a bit wobbly, didn't it?'

― cozen (Cozen), Friday, 26 March 2004 19:35 (twenty-one years ago)

The Easter Parade is amazing as well. Truly devastating. Pick up the collected short stories too. There is renewed interest in Yates and the recent reissues are great to see. After reading those short stories i wondered if i would have been so blown away by Carver in the 80's if I had read Yate's stuff first. That first chapter of Revolutionary Road is so perfect it's scary. The whole thing is just jaw-droppingly good to me. Okay, I've used up my quota of front cover blurbs on this thread. later.

― scott seward (scott seward), Friday, 26 March 2004 19:42 (twenty-one years ago)

Carver is pretty overrated. I think if I read Revolutionary Road before the Corrections I would have been as impressed by it. Franzen does very similar things to Yates but worse. I'll pick up Easter Parade.

― Moti Bahat, Friday, 26 March 2004 20:40 (twenty-one years ago)

Yates is an amazing writer, one of those writers who you discover and immediately feel better for knowing that there are other books of his out there waiting for you.

I've read The Easter Parade, which is not quite as masterful as Revolutionary Road (but then few novels are) but is still quietly shattering. The delienation of his characters flaws and how they ultimately must lead to misery and unhappy endings is so perfectly pitched in all of his work it is stunning.

I've also read The Good School which is gentler, more optimistic, less ambitious but almost refreshing as its a break from his usual nihilistic worldview. And Young Hearts Crying, which is a sort of Revolutionary Road rehash, though nowhere near as good. Still worth reading though.
Also read the collected stories, which are beautiful, and just bought A Special Providence, which I will read very soon.
Someday I will find Disturbing the Peace at an affordable price on the net and I will be a happy man...

One of the things about Revolutionary Road (I think it says this in the introduction to my edition) is that it came out in the same year as Catch 22 and The Moviegoer. Wow......what a year for lovers of American fiction...

― David Nolan (David N.), Saturday, 27 March 2004 01:36 (twenty-one years ago)

two years pass...

ok i finally read this. thought easter parade was better honestly, but maybe just because i read it first. women seem too mysterious in revolutionary road in comparison, and the narrative too reminiscent of hardy while easter parade felt more astonishing and fresh in a bunch of ways. reading thru rev road it made me wish there was something like this sort of fiction for the modern day. i feel like mcinerny also really came from this school in his better half, and then there was also the coke-fueled party half that was all about the anomie of sensationalism and was much less smart, but yeah, if there was something that pull off the social portrait sweep of yates in its cunning of history, that tragedy of escape fantasies becoming the chains of their own unfulfillment (or, er, less awkwardly phrased but y'know). the most prescient thing about rev road seemed, at least at first glance, to be this way it captured irony as a sort of slim empty denial of what one was, the absurdity of the cartesian notion of self set loose in a country becoming modular, cellular, and self-similar all while promoting a vision of new spaces for the individual. and also yeah now the churning sensation i'm going to have in my stomach anytime i write anything like that last sentence. that subtle (?) way in which yates points his finger right back at the reader.

the melodramatic device of the asylum feels like it might have been dated even at the time he was writing tho?

― s.clover, Friday, 9 March 2007 08:22 (eighteen years ago)

I read an interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman where he was enthusing about this book and Wright in general. I assumed he'd probably optioned RR.

― mulla atari, Friday, 9 March 2007 10:36 (eighteen years ago)

"made me wish there was something like this sort of fiction for the modern day"

maybe there is someone and i just haven't read them. i read something like music for torching by a.m. homes or perrotta's little children and my response is: eh, you wish. it's like kids playing dress-up. (maybe they are easy targets though) i never read the corrections. so i don't know how successfully it mined similar territory. yates' quiet desperation is more like blunt force trauma, and maybe it's just too hard to shock people with an accumulation of detail that leads to some level of hysteria/trauma. or people now feel like they have to top each other in a horror movie/fight club kind of way. or in an oprah dead child melodrama kind of way. yet yates still has the power to shock. i dunno. i need to read some more dubus (either younger or elder. the elder being a yates pal). most modern lit i've read that is described as "devastating" rarely is. i still enjoy being devastated for some reason. alice munro can hurt my heart, but she is a different kettle of fish i think. sterl, do you read munro? if not, please do. i should shut up about her on i love books though. i'm a broken record when it comes to her.

― scott seward, Friday, 9 March 2007 15:57 (eighteen years ago)

Never ever apologize for bringing up Munro.

If there is a writer close to Yates writing now, I haven't read him/her. And the Corrections didn't even come close to RR.

― Mr. Que, Friday, 9 March 2007 17:01 (eighteen years ago)

What I think Yates does is sort of distill the literary novel as genre, but then lots of folks at the time he wrote thought like that too. reading some interviews with him and etc. he's very clear what sort of tradition he's trying to stand in and also that he's not feeling any urge to reinvent it or get caught in bigstatement land but really thinks of it as this craft which he intends to practice properly. so you get these big bold wide open sentences and moves that don't tease or apologize for themselves. when the exposition comes, then fine, that's the exposition part, and then there's the movement part and everything is there for a reason.

there's a sort of audacity to it too, that i like, the way he doesn't get caught in details, has no fear of driving the narrative along.

this essay by him is good: http://www.tbns.net/elevenkinds/masters.html

i like how he admires the "objective correlatives" and doesn't beat around the bush with it: "yes, i will have this object, and it will symbolize this thing." it still feels fresh right now, like people are afraid of it, afraid that writing like that will open them up to looking stupid, or trite, or somehow expose the "fictioniness" of their fiction. maybe they don't trust the reader with symbols, or maybe they think they aren't good enough to get the reader to trust them. its almost the same thing as frank's gripes against indie rock vocalphobia.

― s.clover, Saturday, 10 March 2007 06:58 (eighteen years ago)

three months pass...

Posted this on ILBooks by mistake: seems Sam Mendes is shooting the movie adaptation with Leo DiCaprio and K. Winslet..

― baaderonixx, Wednesday, 4 July 2007 15:31 (eighteen years ago)

grrr thought that was ILE...

― baaderonixx, Wednesday, 4 July 2007 15:31 (eighteen years ago)

ten months pass...

i'm reading it now.kinda dissapointing.maybe it has aged.
loaded with banality, cliches and one dimensional writing.
hope it will get better.
Updike did a much much better job on the same subject.

― Zeno, Tuesday, 27 May 2008 21:48 (seventeen years ago)

Ooooooh, them's fighting words on ILB!

― James Morrison, Tuesday, 27 May 2008 23:06 (seventeen years ago)

Read it recently. Was prone to frustratedly thinking at certain points about how I didn't give a damn about people really. At the same time it had the narrative did have this grip on me and I didn't start on anything else till I finished it. The whole section of trying to just GO to France -- w/no reason as to why life will be better over there -- was v effective.

There is going to be a film based on this bk isn't there?

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 28 May 2008 15:06 (seventeen years ago)

liked revoulutionary road waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy more than updike

― t_g, Friday, 30 May 2008 12:25 (seventeen years ago)

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