Selected Product:
| Revolutionary Road
Paperback
Author: Richard Yates
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Release Date: December 2007
ISBN-10: 0099518627
ISBN-13: 9780099518624
List Price: £7.99
Average Customer Rating:
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Originally published in 1961 to great critical acclaim, Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road subsequently fell into obscurity in the UK, only to be rediscovered in a new edition published in 2001. Its rejuvenation is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership. April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled or happy in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paid but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. However, as their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfilment are thrown into jeopardy. Yates's incisive, moving and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs now seem quaintly dated--the early evening cocktails, Frank's illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn't averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn all seem to belong to a different world--and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did 40 years ago. Like F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the poverty at the soul of many wealthy Americans and the exacting cost of chasing the American Dream. --Jane Morris
The most important book I've ever read.
| Customer Rating: | | Never have I read a book that has gone deeper into the human psyche. It reveals stark, unvarnished truths; it observes without condemnation; it is unflinching, poignant and powerful in its delivery; it is inspirational in its style. If a better book has been written then I'm yet to discover it. A must read for all who seek knowledge and understanding about the most complicated creatures in existence: ourselves. |
Exquisite
| Customer Rating: | | There are few writers that can match Yates and this story, of the few I've read (I've resisted the desperate urge to devour them all too quickly) excels beyond so many other writer's work. The comparison drawn with Fitzgerald is right but I would say that Yates is better, more consistent. If you find Fitzgerald frustrating, Yates will show you why better than anyone; if you love Fitzgerald, you will worship this! If you like your books beautifully moving, exquisitely sad and sensual with sharp, dark humour that bites, then it doesn't get better than this. Yates' writing never puts a foot a wrong and from the outset you know you are in safe hands. It's one that shifts your perspective on life and left me fizzing for months, thankful that I found it and disappointed that I can't discover it again. |
Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road
| Customer Rating: | Revolutionary Road deserves all the praise and adulation it's had over the years. Rarely are two protagonists so heartbreakingly real, rarely are they so convincing as living, breathing human beings stuck in the monotonous machine of life, yearning to escape, to break free. Yates advances their arc, their developments and realisations and dreams, brilliantly, and conveys relationship breakdown as realistically as Ian McEwan. This is a great indictment of the American way of life, where individuality and humanity is so easily stifled, and also a strange defense of it. There are times when Frank is happy, and it is only when they strive to break free that things gang agly. And the only person who empathises with the Wheelers is mad.
A great book, full of the kind of brilliant writing that makes you startled to realise you're actually reading. Very sad, but full of warm compassion. There's no way you'll regret reading it. |
A great novel
| Customer Rating: | | I don't want to repeat what most of the other reviewers have written. They are correct - it is a very good novel. The film will help sales. It pre-dates the later Rabbit books by Updike which cover, in some ways, similar ground but I wish I had read this earlier and before Updike (and I did Amer. Lit. at university - no one mentioned Yates!). I was too young in 1961 to read this but those that did then must have realised what a remarkable book it is; maybe today we are used to this kind of theme/writing but then? The question is: would you recommend this book to a young person starting out on life (it might be a real life turn-off for them!)or a person near retirement who might shrug and say: "Yeah, we all had dreams but some times they don't always work out"? |
Understand the modern world
| Customer Rating: | | If you want to get an insight into the break down of family life and the obsession with celebrity and appearance in the post modern world then look no further. The need to be different in the ridiculous stylised modern world of work is covered with great insight. Love and the lust underneath it for what we don't have are there too. Everyone might be flawed in some way but don't worry about that as it's a great read from start to finish. |
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