<p>People tend to write about what they know. Screenwriters who grew up in suburbia write about its dysfunction. Those who grew up in the hood write about the dysfunction there.</p>
<p>Having grown up in a place with similarities to "Revolutionary Road,: I do like such films because they remind me of my home sweet, dysfunctional hometown.</p>
<p>Alwaysamom, I am a HUGE fan of “Mad Men”–while I was a good bit younger than the characters in the show (born in 1950)–I was old enough to know that everything about the show is spot on for the era–the clothes, the attitudes, the smoking–even one scene where the main character and his family go for a picnic in the park, and after the picnic they just leave all the trash and soda cans on the ground. This was how things were then–the breathtaking attention to detail by the creators of the show make it a real joy to watch, and I find the characters tremendously compelling.</p>
<p>dg, </p>
<p>Ahh, I thought maybe I was the only one here who watches Mad Men. 
I watched Season 1 on dvd and am anxious for Season 2 to be released next week. I’m just a couple of years younger than you are and I, too, recognize some of what happens on the show. It’s been interesting talking to my mom about it. You are correct that the attention to detail is breathtaking, something that I always seem to notice, so that makes me very happy. I was reading a first novel recently and there were three or four large factual errors in the book. I wrote a letter to the author. :)</p>
<p>Always, did you also make corrections to the typos on letters and notes from your kids’ teachers? I’m asking because that’s what I did. I have also written to TV show producers regarding shows that had factual errors. Only possible conclusion: we must be related somehow!</p>
<p>If anyone feels like reading more about Richard Yates and his writing:</p>
<p>[The</a> Lost World of Richard Yates](<a href=“http://bostonreview.net/BR24.5/onan.html]The”>http://bostonreview.net/BR24.5/onan.html)</p>
<p>Thanks, epistrophy for the link. Interesting info there.</p>
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<p>dg, yes, I admit that I did correct typos sent home by a teacher. Only one, though. Another one, who was the teacher for one of my other Ds in 2nd grade, also had atrocious spelling but my D was very precocious so she used to make the corrections for her teacher. The teacher actually took that very well and often would have my D proofread letters to go home prior to having them photocopied. That teacher was a very sweet young woman, and truly a good teacher. The poor thing just couldn’t spell!</p>
<p>Maybe we ARE related! You never know in this world. My mom actually has a few half-siblings who don’t know of her existence so anything is possible. :)</p>
<p>The only thing I learned from the article is that Yates is just another pompous “artiste” belittling the everyday efforts of people that make the world livable for him at the fringes. In my view the ultimate in real accomplishment is getting up every day to do what you have to do. Not the childish wanting to do what you want to do–even if you have no special ability or talent to do it. My low opinion of him and the film is now even lower.</p>
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<p>Hmmmm . . . you probably ought to stay away from Hamlet.</p>
<p>Sure they are so close in level of tragedy. Neither character in RR has any special talents or purpose. Her death was no tragedy. Just a selfish final act for a slightly deranged weak woman.</p>
<p>barrons–</p>
<p>While I may not agree with your take on Richard Yates (and in passing I confess that while I’ve read and greatly admired many of his books – both collections of short stories and several of the novels – I haven’t [yet] read Revolutionary Road [or seen the movie, for that matter]), it’s refreshing, for a change, to see folks on cc getting worked up about something other than the day’s political sideshow.</p>
<p>Oh, and if you feel like increasing your apparent loathing for Yates even more, you might take a look at this:</p>
<p>[Chicago</a> Reader | Richard Yates knew enough sorrow to fill a bookshelf. At the end of his life, when I knew him, he was still working on it. By J.R. Jones](<a href=“http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/ourtown/090101/]Chicago”>http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/ourtown/090101/)</p>
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<p>P.S. All this talk about RR has spurred me to order a copy of the new Everyman’s Library volume:</p>
<p>[Amazon.com:</a> Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (Everyman’s Library (Cloth)): Richard Yates, Richard Price: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Easter-Loneliness-Everymans-Library/dp/0307270890/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247168618&sr=1-2]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Easter-Loneliness-Everymans-Library/dp/0307270890/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247168618&sr=1-2)</p>
<p>Fascinating:</p>
<p>“His greatness has never been seriously disputed. His first novel, Revolutionary Road, published in 1961, has been lauded by Kurt Vonnegut (“The Great Gatsby of my time”), William Styron (“A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic”), and Tennessee Williams (“If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction I am sure I don’t know what it is”). Dorothy Parker thought him “extravagantly gifted.” Robert Stone has called him “one of the most important and influential writers of the second half of the century.”
His goodness is another matter—especially now that Blake Bailey has opened the floodgates to Yates’s private life with A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. What comes pouring out is mostly alcohol, because for nearly his entire adult life Yates drank—and drank and drank. He suffered from bipolar disorder, which could never be properly medicated because he refused to quit drinking. He drove away wives, children, friends, and potential employers with his verbal abuse, his psychotic episodes, and his serial nervous breakdowns. Yet many of those interviewed for the book, myself included, remember Yates with great affection: at his best, which is how I saw him much of the time, he could be disarmingly candid and grimly funny, especially regarding himself, and the compassion for life’s losers that made his stories heartbreaking was evident every time he spoke.”</p>
<p>Well, following up on my last post, having now read the first 80+ pages of Revolutionary Road, I can report that it is some of the bleakest fiction I have ever read, conjuring a world so airless and joyless as to be, it would seem, utterly uninhabitable – except for the fact that, alas, it is inhabited, and by characters who, like all of us, tell themselves stories about who they are and what their lives are about in order to carry on with the everyday business of life.</p>
<p>If you’ve read this novel and didn’t find it worthwhile, I have no interest in trying to change your mind. And I can’t speak to the movie (though I’ve seen, in skimming some reviews, including one in the Baltimore Sun, that one take on the movie is to say that it fails to live up to the book [which is of course an old and familiar story in movie adaptations]). But having read nearly a hundred pages of this novel, it has left me with a knot in the pit of my stomach, and I say that as an expression of praise for the power and clarity and grace of Yates’ writing. As the novelist Richard Price puts it in the introduction to this volume, “the beauty and the genius of . . . [Yates’] voice lies in how its gently inexorable tone so eerily mirrors the muffled helplessness of the characters themselves.” I have the distinct feeling that this is a book that will stay with me long after I have finished it.</p>
<p>Many small fortunes have been made by those condemning the small lives of ordinary people that populate society and now the suburbs. The smashed dreams that just must exist in every such home. Yet it is these very people who allow wirters, filmmakers and all other artists to enjoy an organized fairly civilized functioning society. Imagine the chaos if artists actually tried to run anything. Most of the are so dysfunctional we would still be living in caves looking at the latest cave cartoons. In my mind it’s the cheapest shot in the arts. I’m talking to all the drunken/drugged self-hating authors out there. They make up the bulk of the successful suburb bashers out there.</p>
<p>barrons, I haven’t seen the movie or read the book, although I may at some point. I’ve been reluctant to do so because I grew up in an upper-middle-class town in southern Fairfield County, CT, not far from Redding, where Yates apparently lived. Cheever country… and I am heartily sick of the cheap shot genre of suburb-bashing favored by so many poseurs. (Redding, btw, is in fact quite rural compared to most people’s idea of “suburbia,” and was probably much more so then.)</p>
<p>I was born in 1953. I don’t recall that ANY of the mothers I knew worked outside the home, except for the divorced mother of one friend. (Who was also the only person I knew whose parents were divorced.) The women who eventually did start working outside the home were typically occasional substitute teachers and realtors, or they started or worked in local upscale shops. My mother, who was an RN, eventually began working at a local private psychiatric hospital, but not until about 1969/70. In any case, they did not do so until their children were in high school and the upheaval of the 1960s had occurred.</p>
<p>I actually happened to be at home from college during the ice storm depicted in The Ice Storm, and living in the town where it takes place and was filmed. The idea that “wife-swapping” key parties were going on is pretty damned ludicrous. There may have been a set who were into that, but they had to have been very, very, very rare. (Actually, Westport, the local artsier and more adventurous town, was the place reputed to have such things. )</p>
<p>Oh, and by the way, I didn’t notice if the town was full of people living lives of quiet desperation. They seemed to be happy to be there. And a lot more sophisticated and well-travelled than apparently Yates gives them credit for.</p>
<p>I wonder if anyone has read John P. Marquand’s Point of No Return?</p>
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<p>barrons–</p>
<p>This horse may be past dead at this point, which makes me reluctant to comment any further, but whether or not your comments fairly represent the movie (which, as I said, I haven’t seen), they represent such a gross distortion of Yates’ own vision that I can’t let them go unanswered. (Have you read any of his books?) Were Yates’ fiction devoid of empathy and compassion – were it simply an exercise in “condemning” – he wouldn’t still be read, much less be considered by many, including Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Ford, Richard Price, Robert Stone, etc., etc., etc., a great novelist. As New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani put it, Yates’ “distinctive virtues as a writer” are “his plain-spoken prose, his feel for contemporary alienation, his ability to make the reader both empathize with his characters and understand the depth of their self-deception.”</p>
<p>[Richard</a> Yates News - The New York Times](<a href=“Times Topics - The New York Times”>Richard Yates - The New York Times)</p>
<p>(If you want it, you can have the last word [heck, it’s your thread]; I’m done here.)</p>
<p>“Revolutionary Road has little good to say about American institutions, a common enough sentiment for the time. More interesting are its two heroes. In the beginning Frank and April Wheeler gain our sympathy, since we all know how stultifyingly dull the suburbs are, how false and vapid the consumer culture, how grindingly dumb the office jobs. And we can all identify with the terrors of self-consciousness and the sorrow of things going wrong for the ones we love, the frustrations of money and the realization that we’re nowhere close to living our ideal lives.”</p>
<p>There you have the typical “artist” view of American society from a review of Yates that predates the film by several years.</p>
<p>[The</a> Lost World of Richard Yates](<a href=“http://bostonreview.net/BR24.5/onan.html]The”>http://bostonreview.net/BR24.5/onan.html)</p>
<p>As we have painfully learned since, wihout the consumer drive economy the society they appear to hate will come to a rapid and painful end and there will be no time for such reflective angst. People will be too busy scuffling for a government handout or robbing each other.</p>