Richard
Yates's novel Revolutionary Road takes as its starting point,
for a critical look at the mid-1950s suburban America, the
production of a play; aptly called The Petrified Forest, the
play is a disaster. The agonizing performance acts as an ironic
metaphor for the way the middle-class Americans lead their
lives. As Yates observes, we act our way through our daily
experiences, adopting a variety of roles, masking even from
ourselves our intentions. No one is redeemed in Yates's biting
narrative: the director, the players themselves and the audience
are all part of a refusal, or inability, to confront reality,
and no one more so than the protagonist Frank Wheeler. Yates's
fiction—currently exciting renewed interest, an interest that will only be invigorated by the film version of Revolutionary Road, to be released at the end of this year—needs to be reassessed and finally recognized. This paper argues for Yates's place in the American canon and suggests that the dismissal of him as just another writer of realist fiction is to miss the many different ways in which he finds elasticity in that form.
With an irony that Richard Yates would have found amusing, the work of this great writer of realist fiction is about to be catapulted into the international arena through the medium of Hollywood. Having spent his literary career writing against falsehood and notions of performative behavior, and specifically against the kind of promises offered by the movie industry in the 1950s, Yates's throaty chuckle can surely be heard from beyond the grave. Yates's work was never widely read in his lifetime, and with the exception of a book devoted to his work published shortly after his death by the Twayne's United States Authors series, very little has ever been written about him. |
