It's fitting that 'Revolutionary Road' (1961) opens with a hollow and lacklustre stage performance. The Laurel Players enact 'The Petrified Forest' which transpires to be a 'static, shapeless, inhumanly heavy weight'. In much the same way the entire lives of the novel's central couple, Frank and April Wheeler, are a 'hopeless emptiness', moulded into the cookie-cutter lifestyle demanded by the American Dream. Frank prostitutes his 'body and college-boy smile' to a boring office job and April resents her 'corny' role as suburban wife and mother. It is highly ironic, then, that in the absence of genuine affection in his loveless marriage, a similarly unhappy family friend of the Wheelers measures his wife's value in terms of the degree to which she is 'very nearly' like April. Possessions in Yates' world seem vacant as well because purposelessness. Household furniture stands impersonally 'arbitrarily grouped for auction' and saccharine 'candy and ice cream' cars are too 'wide' and too 'gleaming' for the muddy roads.
When honing in on Frank, the retrospective narration is broken by the subjunctive mood. These are fantastical imaginings divorced from all likelihood. For instance, the narrative flicks back to when April intrigued Frank as an exceptionally first rate woman and he set out to win her. And though they wed, their marriage is acerbic. It's sobering to read Frank's keenness to keep their fights discreet versus trying to resolve the couple's issues. The Wheelers' fights are personified as Yates reports that 'the fight went out of control', it violently 'quivered', 'wrenched' and 'urged'. It is unclear whether it is Frank and April or the omniscient narrator that is disassociating the fight from the participants, but in either case, the general impression communicated here is one of denial.
In the end in Yates' book, it is only an institutionalised paranoid schizophrenic who is able to recognise and confront their society's myopic expectations. Casting aside social etiquette and the liberal use of rose-tinted adjectives idiolectic to other characters, their hilarious exchanges cut to the dissatisfaction and unhappiness of 1950s American suburban life.
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With thanks to https://www.imdb.com/ for the image.
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