I have always been interested in “lost classics,” books that, for one reason or another, never get their due praise or popularity. Many of these books will stay lost and uncherished, condemned to sit on library shelves or in second-hand bookstores. The author fades from sight and memory. However, there is that moment of discovery when a “lost classic” comes to light again. For example, Nathanael West did not achieve major critical praise in his lifetime, and yet his Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust have gone on to become cult-classic American literature.

Revolutionary Road is such a book, a “lost classic” that has been grossly overlooked. With the release of a film adaptation (directed by Sam Mendes of American Beauty fame and starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio), the book has skyrocketed back onto the best-seller lists—almost fifty years after it was published.

The thin plot synopsis on the back cover of the book attempts to pull you in with a kind of Desperate Housewives marketing ploy, but to stop there and take it at face value would be lazy. We do not have just another tale of suburban disorder in our hands when we hold this volume; we have a masterwork, a deftly crafted mosaic of shattered lives and dreams. It is one of the greatest American novels ever written. It is a raw work of youth, but also one of the greatest first novels ever written.

* * *

Meet Frank and April Wheeler, two sophisticated suburbanites with two children who live in the development of Revolutionary Hills on Revolutionary Road, in a lovely house with a picture window. Frank has a boring job in the same boring company that his father worked for. April is a housewife—a one-time wannabe actress who never actually appeared in anything. They are enjoying the prosperity of the 1950’s—the one decade, someone once said, where everyone came close to that old fable, The American Dream.

Frank seems to be uncomfortable with their lifestyle. He has an affair with a girl in the reception area, a one-time fling on his birthday, which opens into a musing on the past and the present, the personal and the public:

“When it was over, though, when they had fallen apart and rejoined each other in a lightly sweating tangle of arms and legs, he knew he had never been more grateful to anyone in his life. The only trouble was that he couldn’t think of anything to say.[…]

“Well,” he said at last, I guess this wasn’t exactly what you had in mind when you went to work this morning, was it?”

The silence continued, so complete that he was aware for the first time of the ticking of an alarm clock in the next room. Then:

“No,” she said. “It certainly wasn’t.” And she quickly sat up. She groped for the royal blue sweater and snatched it up to cover herself. Then, hesitating, she seemed to decide that modesty could hardly matter any more […] 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 himself had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there. Her face and neck were pale but a deep red blush began to mottle both her cheeks, as if she’d been slapped, and she looked so vulnerable that for a second or two he was certain he could read her thoughts. What would Norma say? Would Norma be appalled at her for being so easy to get? No; surely Norma’s feeling would be that in a really adult, really sophisticated affair it would be hopelessly banal to think in such terms as being “easy” or “hard” to “get”. Yes, but still, if it was as adult and sophisticated as all that, why couldn’t she decide what to do with her sweater? Why was she having such an awful time thinking of what in the world she could possibly say to this man?”

Later that evening, April greets him when he comes home:

“…She handed him an Old-Fashioned glass full of ice and whiskey and disappeared into the darkened living room, from which, now, he could hear an ill-suppressed giggle of children and the scrape of a match.

“All right,” she called. “Now.”

They were at the table, and he looked into all three of their faces before he saw what it was that bathed them in a flickering yellow light. It was a cake with candles. Then came their slow, shrill singing:

“Hap-py birth-day to you…”

Jennifer’s voice was the loudest and April’s voice was the only one in tune when they took the high note—“Hap-py birth-day, dear Dad-dy…” but Michael was doing the best he could, and his was the widest smile.”

Richard Yates was a master stylist. He knew that the order in which things are presented to the reader mattered, as did his compatriots John Cheever and John Updike. The two scenes, contrasted could create a soap-opera atmosphere, yet Yates knows better than to go down that road. By having the affair and the birthday party follow one after the other, Yates makes the day-to-day occurrences of Suburban life tragic. April has gone out of her way to show Frank how much she and the children love him, while Frank has violated their marriage vows.

* * *

The neighbors seem quite typical folk. There is a like-minded couple, the Campbells. The two couples seem to support each other, giving each other a taste of the old lives they used to have in the city. They get together every now and then to drink, smoke and have intelligent conversations. Shep Campbell finds himself more and more disgusted by his somewhat clumsy wife, Millie, and more attracted to April as the book progresses.

Mrs. Helen Givings, the local real-estate agent who sold the Wheelers their house, appears in the second half of the novel, bringing with her a husband who frequently turns off his hearing-aid when she starts talking (Howard) and a son who is in a mental institution. Such characters do add humor to an otherwise dark tome, but their jocular appearance lasts only so long. In the words of a good friend, “Underneath the goody-two-shoes lay some very dark socks.”

But my favorite character is Frank’s coworker, Jack Ordway, who seems, at first to be a stock-character—the employee you can’t help but feel sorry for, through no tragedy of his own. Yet he is made more brilliant and fleshed out more than most other characters in the books I’ve read recently:

“The story of Jack Ordway’s life had become a minor legend on the Fifteenth Floor: everyone knew of how he’d married a rich girl and lived on her inheritance until it vanished just before the war, how since then his business career had been spent entirely in the Knox building, in one glass cubical after another, and how it had been distinguished by an almost flawless lack of work. Even here in Sales Promotion, where nobody worked very hard except old Brandy, the manager, he had managed to retain his unique reputation. Except when a really bad hangover laid him low he was up and around and talking all day, setting off little choruses of laughter wherever he went, sometimes winning a tolerant chuckle from Brandy himself, driving Mrs. Jorgensen into fits of helpless giggles that made her weep.

“First of all,” he was saying now, “on Saturday these crazy friends of Sally’s flew in from the Coast all eager for the treat. Could we show them the town? Oh, indeed we could. Old, old buddies of hers and all that and besides, they always bring pocketfuls of loot. So. Started off with lunch at Andre’s, and dear God you’ve never seen such whopping great martinis in your life. Oh, and none of this sissy business of one or two apiece, either, buddy. I lost count. And then let’s see. Oh, yes. There was nothing to do but sit around and drink until cocktail time.” He had abandoned his working posture now, pushed the false papers aside and leaned delicately back in the chair to hold his head with both hands; he was moving it from side to side in the rhythm of his narrative, laughing and talking through his laughter, while Frank watched him with a mixture of pity and distaste. Most of his hangover stories seemed to begin with a flying-in of Sally’s crazy friends on the Coast, or from the Bahamas or from Europe, with pocketfuls of loot, and Sally herself was always featured at the center of the fun—the former debutante, the chic, childless wife and irrepressible playmate. That, at lest, was the way his listeners on the Fifteenth Floor were expected to picture her; Frank had been able to do so, and to picture their apartment as a kind of Noël Coward stage setting, until the time he went home with Ordway for a drink and found that Sally was massively soft and wrinkled, a sodden, aging woman with lips forever painted in the cupid’s bow of her youth. Her every whining intonation of Jack’s name that night, as she swayed bewildered through rooms of rotting leather and dusty silver and glass, showed how deeply she blamed him for allowing the world to collapse; once she had turned up her eyes to the paint-flaked ceiling as if calling on God to punish him—this weak, foolish little man for whom she’d sacrificed her very life, who poisoned all her friendships with his endless counting of pennies, who insisted on grubbing at his dreary, white-collar job and bringing dreary office people home with him. And Jack, apologetically hovering and making little jokes, had called her “Mother”.

“How we ever got back from Idlewild,” he was saying, “I’ll never know…”

* * *

Since his death in 1992, Richard Yates’ books have gone out of print. He went from being a literary figure to being an author on a dusty shelf. In 1999, Stewart O’Nan wrote an essay for the Boston Review, “The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print”. Soon after, a biography of Yates by Blake Bailey appeared. In 2002, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates was published. And soon after, Revolutionary Road returned to the shelves. Now, all of his books are in print.

The career of Richard Yates is the story of a return from darkness, a return from nowhere-land with a happy ending. The story of Revolutionary Road is quite a different matter—it is the brilliant chronicle of Frank and April Wheeler’s descent into darkness, into the nowhere-land, into a domesticated version of hell.