The film of his most famous novel should draw readers to even better work by the gifted realist, Richard Yates, especially his 27 powerful short stories, writes Eileen Battersby
DISCOVERING THAT A revered novel is about to receive what the fearful tend to refer to as "the movie treatment" may well feel rather like watching your school pals examine photographs of your parents sunbathing. But genre differences aside, cinema adaptations need not always result in failure: classic works such as The Grapes of Wrathand To Kill a Mockingbirdsurvived the ordeal with honours, as have others. Many more have fallen as heroes slain in battle, such as Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning All the King's Men(1946), which was made into a fine movie within three years of its original publication, only to languish three years ago in a disastrously earnest remake.
With some books, the film version may at least alert the world to a neglected wonder, such as Sam Hanna Bell's December Bride. Better again, a forgotten writer may enjoy a sweeping revival of his or her entire oeuvre. Director Sam Mendes, in bravely taking on Richard Yates's explosive debut, Revolutionary Road, may not be doing this particular novel any favours, but the film should draw readers of all ages not only to the book, but to other better novels by the gifted realist Yates, whose genius was equally, if not better, served by his 27 powerful short stories, which continue to reverberate with his relentless truth-telling. They are stories featuring guys named Ralph and Frank, guys out to climb one rung higher than Dad, guys out to beat suburban inertia.
Born in 1926, the generation after John Cheever and some six years before John Updike, Yates lacks their sophistication, certainly never achieving the mercurial urbanity of Updike. Nor does he have the consummate elegance of James Salter, who was born the same year; but nonetheless Yates’s work is unique. He was openly influenced by F Scott Fitzgerald and regarded him as his hero, but although consistently exploring his mentor’s preferred theme of the American Dream gone badly wrong, Yates is stylistically nowhere as similar to Fitzgerald as is often claimed. This is probably because his grasp of social class and its multilayered nuances is very unlike Fitzgerald’s – they came from different worlds, even within America. Rather than focusing on old money, Yates identified the new suburbs and, with them, an idea of prosperity based on new, mass-built modern homes in tailored estates.
Above all – and this is important – Yates did not succeed Fitzgerald. Cheever had already tried to do that, but was defeated by history and social change. Fitzgerald, who had redefined the legacy of Henry James, made it almost impossible for anyone in turn to begin to redefine Fitzgerald, although Salter does achieve a hint of it in A Sport and a Pastime(1967). Yates shaped major non-Jewish American writers, such as Robert Stone, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus (who dedicated his 1996 collection, Dancing After Hours, to Yates) and particularly Tobias Wolff. Yates's voice was also important to Richard Ford, but while Yates and Ford explore the lives of individuals caught between the dream and the reality, Ford's graceful, ironic, rhythmic prose separates them. It is Wolff who comes closest to Yates's hardened, open-eyed whimsy, his blunt dramatic power, his relentless truth-telling.
Richard Yates hailed from Yonkers, New York. His family belonged to the lower middle class. Like so many of his literary generation, such as Salter, he served in the US army during the second World War and saw action in France. On his return he joined the publicity department of Remington and wrote advertising copy. He was also beginning to write short stories and, in 1953, was published.
The post-war era was an exciting time, during which US society changed dramatically and people became concerned about having a pink refrigerator in their shiny modern kitchen. Plastic and chrome replaced timber. The housewife emerged as an individual at whom sales were pitched. She became a trend, an icon, breezy, confident and queen of her kitchen. The reality was different. Couples like Frank and April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, who had previously lived and worked in New York, moved out into the new suburbs. The men became robotic commuters, while the women became bored, depressed and lost.
YATES'S SHORT STORIES continued to flow. He published two collections, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love, and the titles alone speak volumes. Yates was an authority on domestic discord: both of his marriages ended in divorce and he often described himself simply as "the father of three daughters". And yes, he liked to drink and was a chronic alcoholic.
His major literary breakthrough came in 1961 with the publication of his first novel, Revolutionary Road, which placed the post-war US centre-stage. The following year it was shortlisted for the National Book Award.
It is chilling stuff. Frank and April Wheeler want the American Dream: he is hearty, ambitious in a limited way, and sufficiently likable to succeed; she is beautiful, brooding, not too pleased about being a mother of two by 29, and still harbouring old notions about being an actress. A disastrous amateur production reminds her of her lack of talent. The Wheelers decide on a bid for freedom, to Europe, where he can become a writer.
They bicker throughout. April has an excuse, having had an unsettled childhood being passed around among relatives. Their affection ebbs and flows because, as Yates so brilliantly conveys, it’s not that they love each other but simply that they are in this mess together. April never wanted their first child, and now the discovery that she is pregnant for a third time amounts to a personal betrayal.
Involved on the sidelines are their friends, another couple, Shep (who lusts after April), and happy, kindly, irritating Milly, the good neighbour who is herself deliriously content living as a Mom in the suburbs. There is another dimension and element in the book, in the shape of Mrs Givings, a self-appointed real estate agent who tries to help everyone and hopes the Wheelers might befriend her disturbed adult son. The news that they plan to move to Paris smashes her hopes:
She cried because she’d had such high, high hopes about the Wheelers tonight and now she was terribly, terribly, terribly disappointed. She cried because she was fifty-six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who’d ever asked her to marry him, and because she’d done it, and her only child was insane.
In this one paragraph, Yates sums up a life. Revolutionary Road is a fine book, which made him famous (he wrote speeches for Robert Kennedy), yet it is not the best of his seven novels.
Disturbing the Peace(1975) is a graphic account of one man's crack-up, which begins when John Wilder fails to return home after a business trip. He calls his wife and announces that he has had repeated sex with a PR girl and has no intention of coming back to her and their son. "You really want to know , sweetheart? Because I'm afraid I might kill you, that's why. Both of you."
Yates's great novel is probably Young Hearts Crying(1984), far more dense and narratively complex than Revolutionary Road. Against the backdrop of the second World War, a struggling writer, determined to prove himself, refuses to make life easier by living off his wealthy and adoring wife's money. The central players are more sympathetic than the Wheelers, and the novel, for all its pain, has far more humour. It also confirms Yates as a sharp observer of US social history.
Within two years of its publication Yates triumphed again with Cold Spring Harbor. This is such a fine book, in which the good-looking, remote Evan Shepard's girlfriend becomes pregnant. The couple marry and their relationship quickly collapses. They part.
One day, by chance, Evan and his father, Charles, one of Yates’s many fascinating supporting characters, knock on a door when their car breaks down. The house is home to tragic abandoned wife Gloria and her two children. The shy, nervous daughter, Rachel, attracts Evan and soon he not only has a second relationship, he has a live-in mother-in-law and a brother. The tension is chronicled with unflinching precision.
Then Evan, who has regularly visited his little daughter by his first wife, begins to get to know the child's mother from the distance of several years away from each other. He realises his mistake. It is a remarkable study of people in turmoil, as is The Easter Parade(1976), in which two sisters battle 40 years of life begun in the shadow of their parents' bad marriage. It is surprising that Mendes and his team were drawn to Revolutionary Road rather than The Easter Parade, which seems far more suited to cinema.
THE SHORT STORIES are also rich in characters who live and breathe and hope and fail. One of the best is Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired, in which Bill Grove, a wry narrator, recalls his divorced mother's efforts to become a sculptor of note:
Her idea was that any number of rich people, all of them gracious and aristocratic, would soon discover her: they would want her sculpture to decorate their landscaped gardens, and they would want to make her their friend for life.
The mother is sustained by her hopes. But the story is really about a betrayal. Later, in Regards at Home, the same narrator continues the story of his mother, no longer young but still jaunty:
She was fifty-seven years old. It had often occurred to me that she was crazy – there had been people who had said she was crazy as long as I could remember – but I think it must have been that night, or very soon after wards, that I decided to get out.
One of the minor characters in Revolutionary Road, Jack Ordway, may well have stumbled from the pages of Fitzgerald. But with Jack Fields, the novelist who leaves New York for Hollywood in the story Saying Goodbye to Sally, Yates actually acknowledges that Fields is preoccupied with emulating Fitzgerald.
Anyone interested in truth, anyone capable of absorbing its pain and its wisdom, should look to Richard Yates, who taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and became a guru. He died in 1992, aged 66. No, he wasn’t Jewish, he wasn’t from the South and he wasn’t particularly funny, but his voice evokes life as it is lived.
Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates, is published by Vintage; the film opens on Jan 30
