Chosen by Time magazine as one of the Hundred best novels since Time began, this debut novel first published in 1961 was a finalist for the National Book Award. It became a three-times Oscar nominated film directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; I've never seen the film.
It's about how the need to grow up and earn a living destroys our dreams.
It's 1955 in the USA. Frank wants life to be meaningful. April, his wife, married him because he was always talking of things that seemed important and worthwhile. But now he is saddled with “the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs.” (1.2) She is a housewife and mother bringing up two children. They devise a plan to drop out of the rate race and move to Europe where she will work and he will find himself. But events and human weakness conspire to undermine their dreams.
We've all been there. We've all had to compromise on our hopes. This is a universal theme.
Despite being written in the third-person 'omniscient' and past tense, it was almost entirely from the PoV of Frank.
My problem was that I didn't like the characters. Now that should be a sign of excellence in writing: to inspire such a reaction in your reader. But I wasn't sure that I wholly believed in them:
- April was a neurotic doormat. She seemed to live entirely for her man. She seems entirely contented with her role as a domestic servant; her plans for the future revolve around making her man more fulfilled. She says things like: “You always do have the right instinct about things like this. You’re really a very generous, understanding person, Frank.” She belatedly realises this when, finally and of course disastrously, she makes up her mind to rebel. “The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was effort to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear.” (3.7) But in terms of the book this epiphany came too late. I suppose you can argue that their row-strewn marriage was fuelled by her unrealised anger. I suppose you can argue that women in America in 1955 were complacently subservient. But it didn't ring true to me.
- Frank almost completely lacks self-awareness. He's a self-pitying bully and tyrant. He wants to feel that he's a man. In conversation he's a bore. Somehow he has done less than the minimum at work for seven years and kept his job. He can embark upon an affair without any feelings of guilt. Of course you don't need your main character through whose eyes the others are seen to be a hero but Frank was so unpleasant that, even though he had dreams (although he never really visualised them) and now his life is dull dull dull, I couldn't sympathise. Stop whingeing and get over it was how I felt.
I am aware that I am judging these characters (a) as if they were real (which suggests that the book was well-written) and (b) in the light of contemporary standards, after we have had nearly seventy years of feminism.
The other characters were very much in the background. Mrs Givings (I kept reading that as 'misgivings') was a nice little cameo role.
The plot was mostly predictable and paced very much as you would expect.
There are some wonderful descriptions:
- "as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.” (1.2)
- “His temple ached in zeal and triumph as he heaved a rock up from the suck of its white-wormed socket and let it roll end over end down into the shuddering leafmold, because he was a man.” (1.3)
- “His thin gray body, which seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to fill the minimum requirements of a hard-finish, double-breasted business suit.” (2.4)
But if you want trapped suburban American angst, I'd prioritise Rabbit, Run by John Updike and its sequel Rabbit Redux.
There's an interesting homage to The Great Gatsby. Compare these two passages:
- “‘I just remembered that today’s my birthday.’ I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.” (The Great Gatsby, Ch 7)
- “I just thought of something ... Tomorrow’s my birthday. ... I'll be thirty years old.” (Revolutionary Road 1.4)
Selected quotes:
- “His face did have an unusual mobility: it was able to suggest wholly different personalities with each flickering change of expression.” (1.2)
- “Nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ... and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach." (1.2)
- “You want to know why everybody thinks you're a jerk? Because you're a jerk, that's why.” (1.2)
- “It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress.” (1.3)
- “Wasn't it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn't really wanted to do?” (1.3)
- “He had never seen such a stare of pitying boredom in her eyes.” (1.4)
- “Her hair was as unattractively wild now as it must have been in childhood; it seemed to have exploded upward from her skull into hundreds of little kinks. She touched it delicately with her fingertips in several places, not in any effort to smooth it but rather in the furtive, half-conscious way that he had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there.” (1.6)
- “Don't ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’ really mean the same thing?” (3.1)
- “She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known ... that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.” (3.7)
- “The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something.” (3.9)
October 2024; 337 pages
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