When Sam Mendes’s film Revolutionary Road came out in 2008, the novel of the same name from which it is drawn miraculously reappeared in bookshops. And not only in English. Minimum Fax, God bless small publishing houses, brought out a fine edition and a good translation of Yates’s text, introduced, among other things, by an essay in which Richard Ford sets out its great merits and its inexplicable neglect. The film, moreover, is more than solid, played by the man who is perhaps the finest actor of his generation, Leonardo DiCaprio, and by a Kate Winslet, then the director’s wife, at the height of her powers. Until at least the 1990s Yates remained merely a “writer’s writer,” almost unknown to the general public, and one might have supposed, or hoped, that the film would spur the purchase, the reading and the critical reappraisal of the novel; I do not know what happened in the English-speaking countries, but in Italy it was read by few and almost immediately forgotten.
And yet this is one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century American literature; if it is not The Great Gatsby, with which it is often compared, it comes close to it. It is not The Great Gatsby, quite apart from the absolute value of the work, also because the register is different, the manner in which a theme is expressed that is nonetheless analogous to that of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. And perhaps, as we shall see, it is precisely this different manner that conceals the core of the novel. The Great Gatsby paints the metaphysical picture of modern America, and behind it of the Western world that reverberates with its conquests, myths and illusions. In a high, literary style, Gatsby portrays a human figure who, in the eyes of those who meet him, beginning with the “narrator,” passes continually from a type of man into a living creature and who, in the alternation of the abstract and the concrete figure, the one fading into the other, tells of a culture open to the future with the joy and the drive of a people still young, at once mythical and real. Gatsby is the epitome of a will to exist that is frustrated and compromised not so much by the pettiness, by the craving for power and money of the characters who revolve around him, as by the worm hidden within hope itself, time, the principal protagonist of the novel, against which Gatsby’s civilization and our own, more now than then, possess ever fewer means of defence. The register is indeed “metaphysical” in its attempt to identify, and to condense into style and characters, the soul of a culture.
In Revolutionary Road too it is a dreamed-of life that serves as the point of reference, but here the whole affair unfolds inside the heads of the protagonists, indeed, as we shall see, above all inside the head of one of them, the man. Gatsby is an indeterminate character who has the courage to pursue a dream he does not know to be unattainable. Frank, Yates’s male character (we are by now at the end of the 1950s), is perfectly aware that the “other life” to be reached has the nature of a fairy tale, yet he wants his wife April to acknowledge, enraptured, his capacity to build, define and pursue, like a hero, his El Dorado. In short, he would like the ideal to be lived and enjoyed solely in words and in the resolute bearing of the male who charts the road ahead, letting the future be deferred from one day to the next and, to the very end, remain only dreamed. Gatsby’s mirage fails, but its vague content is a vapour that pervades the whole novel; right up to the final words, the “beating on against the current,” it is still the spirit of the new world. Frank’s individual dream, by contrast, has the character of the impossible object: something that can acquire meaning if and only if it remains unreal. The myth of the American “frontier,” the moving boundary of what is to come, begins to crumble.
Frank calls to mind the character of another gem of English-language literature that precedes Revolutionary Road by a century. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of the story, enthusiastically sacrifices her life as a wife to the narrow, pedantic scholar Casaubon so that he may at last set down his life’s work, which, as it happens, has as its theme “the Key to all Mythologies.” But Casaubon wants only to be admired and coddled for a book that, in the depths of his bad faith, he knows he will never write. Dorothea’s naïve and passionate determination, spurring him mercilessly to work, will end by killing him, just as Frank’s hesitations and endless postponements will kill April. To enjoy unattainable dreams, and to make others enjoy them, one needs a sophisticated capacity for lying to oneself, which April lacks, or at least an outside party who admires the strength of the dreamer; but April admires her husband precisely (and only) because she credits him, amid doubts and suspicions right up to the end, with the real capacity to build a new life. The suspended, abstract atmosphere of Fitzgerald’s novel and of Gatsby’s dreams plunges, in Yates, like a zoom that drops from the sky onto a small corner of the world, into the fight to the death to give meaning to the hope of a “new life” of two petit-bourgeois souls. As happens in nature too, the microcosm has the same revelatory power as sidereal space.

Frank and April Wheeler, a couple of the American middle class, have recently moved into a “charming” little house surrounded by greenery, “at the top of a gentle rise,” in the neighbourhood that winds along Revolutionary Road. The story is punctuated above all by Frank’s commuting between the family and the firm where he works in the city. The reader follows Frank’s wanderings and the thoughts that accompany him through the day: the boredom of the office, the chatter with friends, a casual mistress, colourless and pathetic, for whom he feels pity and shame. In the background, hundreds of cigarettes (each one seemingly lit from the stub of the last) and ceaseless drinking. But Frank’s stretches of time “on his own” seem dilated to the utmost precisely in order to defer the crucial moment when, returning home, he will have to face his wife and undergo the examination of the character he has constructed for himself: of April “on her own” the reader knows nothing! Thus the little house on Revolutionary Road keeps changing its aspect: from the stage on which Frank celebrates his own triumph into something like the Hopperesque motel where the Norman of Psycho meets the phantoms of his mind.
When he manages to feed his wife’s dreams, together with the only couple of friends the Wheelers see and who act as a sounding board, Frank, sunk into the sofa at home, one leg crossed over the other and his knee level with his forehead, muses in a kind of intoxication on the meanness of American life, the narrowness of his fellow citizens and the paltriness of their ideals: “Our whole country is soggy with sentimentality.” “It’s something that has spread like a disease, for years, for generations, and now whatever you touch is steeped in it […]. And I ask myself: isn’t this, when you look closely, the very heart of the matter? More than the profit motive or the loss of spiritual values, I mean, more than the fear of the atom bomb or anything else?” “The important thing,” and this is the task Frank believes he was put on earth for, “is not to let yourself be contaminated!” Frank’s speeches are plainly vague, chaotic and without a centre, but what matters is that, in his blathering, he pretends to believe in a different, possible destiny, perhaps in the old continent, in France, where he was during the war, and above all that the others, April first of all, acknowledge the force of his visions. At moments like these, along with his own words there echo in Frank the words his wife once said to him and that stand for the meaning of a life: “It’s true, Frank. I mean it. You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever known”; “You’re the most precious and beautiful thing in the world. You’re a man.”
To these moments, by now ever rarer and mostly recalled, are opposed others, more frequent, that accompany Frank Wheeler’s descent into hell: the moments in which his game is unmasked. In fierce, glacial outbursts of rage, an April/Hyde now voices a contempt for her husband that is not simply personal and warranted; the disproportion between the enchanted admiration and the sense of repugnance, physical as well, between the two Aprils is too radical to have a merely psychological explanation. It is as if the disgust Frank reads in his wife’s words were all that remains of himself, a kind of brute fact, once words can no longer exorcise reality. The “most interesting person she had ever known,” the “sexy walk,” turn, like a thunderclap sweeping away the castle of chimeras, into “I don’t love you […], the truth is that the very sight of you sickens me”; “you, Frank, you’re not a man!”
Clearly the story as told gives some grounds for the clashes between the Wheelers and for the wife’s abrupt changes of mood. The couple has two children, and in both cases April got hold of a “rubber syringe” to abort (abortion is still a crime), and in both cases Frank managed to prevent her; the reader does not quite know how, but he talked her into keeping them. The novel opens, moreover, with April’s fiasco in a stage production (it is Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest, in which one “dreams” of leaving for France) into which the community had thrown itself with great expectations; a fiasco that is followed by the first terrible clash between husband and wife. With Frank clumsily trying to console his wife (Frank wants his intervention to be capable of consoling her) and April seeming to see, in her husband’s hypocrisy and in the family into which he has forced her, the repression and the failure of her youthful desire to become an actress. The reconciliation after the devastating opening quarrel comes about through a sudden, radical conversion. April takes upon herself all the blame for the family’s troubles and proposes to her husband an immediate move to France. In the old and cultivated world where Frank will at last be able to make his gifts count, she will be the one, at first, to work and support the family, allowing her husband to accomplish what the meanness of American life has not permitted: “you’ll read, you’ll study, you’ll take long walks and think […]. For the first time in your life you’ll have all the time you need to find out what you want to do, and once you have found out, you’ll have the time and the freedom to begin it.” “Good God, Frank, I’m certainly not the one to tell you what is wrong with this environment. I am practically repeating your words to the letter.” In the period before the hypothetical move, however, April becomes pregnant for the third time, and the journey to Paris dissolves once more into the indistinct. In this case too, as in a compulsion to repeat, Frank will try to dissuade his wife from aborting. But he will only manage to postpone the event. When it is by now too late, in a kind of sacral suicide, April will attempt the abortion, bleeding to death.

But the explicit motives briefly listed above (there are not many others), and this is the point, explain little, if anything. Isolated from its context, April’s character is decidedly schizoid; the shift from ecstatic admiration of her husband to brutal contempt would in itself be merely the mark of a personality more disturbed than determined. Not for nothing does the film, without a reading of the novel, convey a plot with something incongruous at its core (even though the final abortion scene alone, for tension and drama, makes it worth watching). The fact is that the reader of the novel does not notice the incoherence: it is the product of an abstraction that comes after the reading. The reader follows April’s changes at first hand, from the husband’s point of view, and from his point of view April is the most coherent answer life can give to ideals that feed solely and exclusively, for as long as it lasts, on the recognition of others. April is largely unfathomable, but she is so in the way that the immediate passage from the gratuitous admiration our fellow creatures grant us to their equally gratuitous rejection is unfathomable in the lives of us all. Psychologically too, Frank’s love for his wife is at once genuine and basely mean: he cannot do without her and is moved at the mere thought of touching her, and yet, when April’s admiration turns from silent to active, Frank discovers that his wife “is not much to look at after all: too old now, too tall and too tense.” When April confesses that she forced him to accept “the great sentimental petit-bourgeois lie.” When she cries: I “forced you to live by this lie,” in her husband’s eyes she comes to look more and more like Maureen, the sad, colourless mistress picked up at the office. The ideal April as wife would consist in keeping to a “right measure” of admiration; when she exceeds it, Frank either fears her or begins in his turn to despise her. But it is precisely this balance that is impossible: April can only either dream along with her husband or unmask his painful, pathetic lies.
And Frank’s lie is the belief that words, and words alone, by opening an indeterminate future, can dull the pain of living. Even his refusal of abortion owes nothing to moral reasons: the presence of the children allows him to remain in America and ensures the continuity of an edifying narrative, in the part where the dream, never confronting reality, slides into the indistinct.
After April’s death, in the closing pages, the reader no longer lives the story from Frank’s point of view; once April is gone, her husband’s soul disappears as well. Of him we have news only through the minor characters. These too, more or less all of them except the children, are hardly exemplary. And yet, beyond their flaws and their pettiness, they possess the virtue that Homeric ethics attributed to heroes, resignation, a virtue of which the novel’s two heroes are radically deprived.
If it is true that “no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality” and that “even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream” (S. Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House), it is also true that dreams rest on unavoidable conditions of possibility. Once every objective dimension is bracketed off (social, institutional, political, religious, or whatever kind it may be) that protects, nourishes and sustains the dream as an opening onto the future, the dream inevitably turns into a nightmare. The modern tragedy of the Wheelers is precisely that of two individuals who lean solely on each other.
The invitation to read Revolutionary Road is also an invitation to read all of Yates, even though with the American writer things proceed in the opposite direction to what happens, to give two examples, in writers such as Fitzgerald or Italo Svevo. Yates too is at bottom the writer of a single novel, but whereas in the latter the quality of the work is gradually refined until it reaches the masterpieces of maturity, Yates’s later novels (with the exception, perhaps, and only in part, of The Easter Parade) would never again attain the power of Revolutionary Road, his first book. The muse of literature would never again assist him as she does in the story of the Wheelers.
This does not mean that the later writings are not thoroughly enjoyable. What Yates maintained throughout his career is the level of the writing. With Yates it does not happen that the reader is left astonished at the creativity of the language, the power of the images, the wordplay, the richness and the unthinkable pairings of the adjectives, as can happen, for example, with Nabokov or with Flaubert. Yates’s writing is made of short, simple sentences, but truly impressive is his capacity to fix in a few words, and render indelible, an image: a child crying, the obscene mouth of a man eating, the smell of a person. Moments of life which, after all, remain and work within each of us more than the Oedipus complex does. Yates is a marvel at clearing the most delicate situations with elegance, like an expert skier, as when, in a brief turn of phrase, he pins down someone who, while doing one thing, is at the same time thinking another, against a background of further, indeterminate sensations. I do not know how much the creative-writing courses so fashionable today are worth, or what use they are. Reflecting on Yates’s novels and training oneself on his writing certainly helps to school one’s own clarity of mind.

***

The bleakness of the stories Yates tells, and above all the inner desolation of his characters, perhaps help to drive many readers away. But giving up modern tragedies would be like giving up the classical ones. The advice is to read Revolutionary Road as a contemporary tragedy, paradigmatic, like the Greek ones, of an existential situation, in this case set in America, at the apotheosis of modernity, at the end of the fifties. Nor does one come away from the reading saddened at all. Aristotle’s teaching still holds: the work of art allows the reader’s catharsis. Which is not only the calm produced by distance and by the increase in knowledge that reading affords, but the true inner “purification” that comes from moved participation in the story being told.

Luigi Cimmino teaches Epistemology and Ethical Paradigms at the University of Perugia.