Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $2.87 You Save: $12.08 (81%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Revolutionary Road
Book Review: A very modern book written in 1961
Summary: 5 Stars
April and Frank Wheeler are around thirty and live in a suburb in Connecticut. They have a nice house, Frank has a job that is not too demanding and they have two small kids, so in essence all a couple can wish. Except, that they are not happy at all: April has not become the actress she wanted to be, they consider their neighbours and friends to be narrow-minded and they have fights over small matters that become so big that it is practically impossible to cope with it. In a last attempt to escape April decides that the family will move to Europe: she will work and Frank will finally have time to develop his talents. Frank does not exactly want to go, but he does not know how to tell his wife. And so the family heads for disaster without anybody noticing or knowing what to do about it.This book was written in 1961, was nominated for big prizes together with such classics as Catch-22 and was forgotten after that. It is really a very modern book: the dreams and expectations of "the common" people have not changed much in all those years and the way in which Frank and April react and interact is only too recognizable. At times this book really hurts. You would like to shout to them: "Listen to each other!" "Don't fight over marginal subjects!" A good book that deserves to be rediscovered.
Book Review: Absolute Classic
Summary: 5 Stars
This story knocked me off my feet - I've read it three times. The quality of writing is so skilled, so perfect, that you just gape in awe at the page infront of you. The story grabs you by the mind and heart and does not let you go until the last word is read. This is a book to be savoured, discussed, and read again.Book Review: America the desolate
Summary: 5 Stars
You don't have to be a writer to read Richard Yates. Revolutionary Road can still stun after all these years, revealing the truths and fears that we all have first as young adults and then as aging misanthropes. (After experiencing such failures of young adulthood what else could we become?) Every word in this book rings with sharp clarity. It's actually frightening. The laughter we may utter from time to time while reading is a gutteral knowing laugh, both hideous and satyr like. We laugh from the pain--the heart ripping, gut twisting turn of events. No one deserves to live out these terrible "truths," but unfortunately we often do. And Yates presents it all casually in simple language and very straight forward. . .I think it was Swift who said satire is a glass in which everyone sees everyone but himself. And though I wouldn't definitiively call this book satire, it comes close except one can't help but see him/herself, mucking around in this detritus. . . Read the book. It's still an experience.Book Review: America's great literary discovery
Summary: 5 Stars
Richard Yates is a writer's writer. Every paragraph, every sentence, every punctuation mark seems relentlessly perfect. His unusual, unnerving realism, which has captivated Andres Dubus, Richard Ford, and so many others, lacks the fireworks of a DeLillo or the intricacies of a Pynchon, but offers the accessibility and the density of an American Tolstoy.
Revolutionary Road is a classic account of America's historic infatuation with joining in, but distancing from, the middle class. Yates give us a perfect book that proffers chills as well as thrills to any reader who has the fortitude to give its middle class characters a fair hearing.
No American writer has made occasionally unsympathetic, always unexceptional characters more interesting or more intelligible.
Not merely scary good, but truly scary great.
Book Review: American Classic-Reviewed by Eric Carlson
Summary: 5 Stars
Unsettling, offputting, and somewhat depressing, this very American novel is about ourselves. To read it is to see the world of 1955 without the usual props and gimmicky idealization. Revolutionary Road is Richard Yate's greatest novel--subtle and realistic, it touches notions we rarely ponder: the Wheelers are not happy in ways that are seldom explored by suburbanites of early 21st century America. They have a sense of longing for something better. Irrepressibly and arrogantly, they aspire to a fallicious and outdated vision-becoming American expatriots in Paris. Their dreams lead to a tragedy unsettling and somehow touching. If this is not the Great American Novel, I do not know what is. Thankfully, Yates does not make use of Heller's satire and Vonnegut's post-modern meanderings; instead, Yates explores the suburban dystopia without these ironic flourishes and sophomoric condemnations. He is Cheever without the poetry--a veritable Chekov of twentieth century America. This heart-wrenching story of foibles is as relevant today as it was in the fifties or 1961 when it was written. I realize that comparisons to great works have become de rigeur, but I must say that when I first encountered Yates, I felt as I had when I first discovered the works of William Faulkner or Franz Kafka. In retrospect, it is unfortunate that more will not have the pleasure of reading the Trial, Moby Dick or Revolutionary Road.