Tore through Revolutionary Road in three days. Yates perfectly captures the delicate balance between responsibility and personal satisfaction, locating the dilemma in the decisions of a young couple in 1955. I'm still thinking about it... (Can one ever really know the difference between gut instinct and self-delusion?) Although it's your standard realist novel, the ambiguity of the causes and effects of the Wheelers' disastrous relationship make it more mirror than cautionary tale--its issues are just as vital and necessary as they were then. I hope the upcoming film maintains this ambiguity.As Blake Bailey says in a 2007 article,
Were Yates alive to advise Mendes, I daresay he'd insist that the movie begin, as the novel does, with April's mortifyingly awful performance in an amateur production of The Petrified Forest. In other words, the Wheelers' doom should never be in doubt because they can't help being themselves. "When the curtain fell at last," Yates wrote, at the end of one of the most excruciating scenes in American literature, "it was an act of mercy."
