The current movie trailer shows a lot of emotive angst and anger. The book is incredibly subtle when it comes to that; the characters empty lives are reflected in cardboard suburban lifestyles. As close as possible to a five star rating save for a slowness in the books center section, but a necessary one nonetheless preparing the reader for a gut-wrenching conclusion. Yates is one of those authors I hate; he makes prose look so easy. This is an exceptionally well-written book. ( )

Frank and April Wheeler are desperately unhappy. Married for the sake of their children, living lives that they believe are meaningless, in a suburban town full of similar ordinary couples, they are both clamoring inwardly for a change. They believe they are superior to their neighbors and are determined to prove it. April comes up with the genius idea of uprooting and moving to France, where she can work and Frank can find the intellectual fulfillment that he’s always longed for. Unfortunately, this plan sets the couple on a path to their own personal tragedy.

This is a deft, amazing book. Frank and April despair at the ordinariness of their neighbors in the suburbs, lamenting the blandness and sameness of their lives, but the reader knows better. Yates treats us to an inside view of the Wheelers’ closest neighbors, and we learn that one of their friends mistakenly believes he is in love with April, while the other older couple has a son committed to a mental institution. When that son starts to espouse the same views that Frank and April have, we begin to realize that everyone is slightly off-kilter here. Everyone is unhappy and dissatisfied. Frank and April are deluded by their own aspirations into thinking that they’re better than their neighbors, when really they quite simply belong. They believe they’re extraordinary, but over the course of the novel, we realize that they are perfectly ordinary. They fit right in.

It is certainly those ordinary characters that succeed as the huge draw for this novel. Their humanity is overwhelmingly real. Frank, for example, is insufferably arrogant at times, and totally misguided about almost everyone he interacts with, but few people set him straight. Worse, he says one thing and thinks another. He claims to want to go to France and find himself, but it becomes clear very early on that he’s actually quite satisfied with his job. He’s bored but he doesn’t want to disturb the status quo; he believes he is special, but he isn’t going to put forth the effort to actually prove it. Perhaps he knows it isn’t true, even as he’s unwilling to admit it. April seeks to recapture something with her acting and briefly succeeds, only to become an embarrassing failure when she doesn’t actually prove to be as spectacular as she’d hoped. Their lives are empty and they are always seeking, but never finding.

Of course, the book is very well written, and in the one instance that I’d have loved to share passages, the book had to go back to the library. Regardless, I could easily place myself in these characters’ shoes and there wasn’t anything that threw me out of the story. The eeriest part about it is that Revolutionary Road makes us think about our own lives and those of our neighbors. Frank and April are still very relevant almost fifty years on as people consistently search for meaning in their lives. It often seems that we are all on a quest for fulfillment and in that respect, this book’s message is haunting, reminding us to seek happiness in what we have and not what is constantly out of reach. ( )

“I love you when you're nice.” April Wheeler says this to her husband Frank and it becomes a defining moment for the couple. This single line gives the reader an intimate look at these two characters and how they cling to each while trying to break free at the same time.

April and Frank are the perfect example of a happy young couple, or at least that's the image they project to friends and neighbors. They are young, beautiful, and living what can be thought of as a happy life in the suburbs of Connecticut. Frank works a job he simply describes as boring and does his best not to talk about if at all possible. In fact, he secretly finds irony in the knowledge that his father also worked for the same company, something he has only ever mentioned to his wife.

April spends her days searching for her true self and yearning for a different life. She and Frank talk constantly of the draining existence that is the suburbs and how they will never live to their full potential and will die inside trying to live a dream that is not their own. They want out and it's April that finally concocts a plan to get them out --- by moving to France. They begin making plans and life takes on a new excitement for them. They look forward to leaving behind the drudgery of their lives. It's only when circumstances change do their lives take on the stark reality of everyday life they attempt to avoid each and every day.

Yates writes in such a way that readers feel as if they are these people and what they are feeling and experiencing is so real that you want to recoil at the rawness of it all. You feel the strain in the marriage, the love they do have for one another at certain times, and the embarrassment they feel. There is also the sheer realization that what these two characters are facing are questions we all have about our own lives. They are sad people, wonderful people, and very much real people.

You see the falling apart of two people and the life they have tried to cobble together in this book. The hopes and dreams of two people shattered, yet, there is also an incredible hopefulness especially when they are planning their future but you know all of it is really just an exercise in escapism for these two people who are just so very unhappy and disappointed with how their lives have turned out. You want to root for them but you know they are going to only remain disgusted with not only each other but everyone in their lives.

Revolutionary Road is a great book for the simple reason that Yates makes us April and Frank. He pushes us to examine our needs, wants, and dreams and do it in such a way that makes you want to run away to France to make yourself over. You hate him for making you feel so intensely, not only for these two characters, but for the very real way he is going to make you examine your life. ( )

A great book that really gets you thinking about class, position and aspiration- and do you really want to get there anyway?
Frank Wheeler and his wife, April, look down on the others in their middle-class American suburb and dream of an exotic, cultured life in Europe. As they get closer and closer to planning their dream, wishes begin to change but not always with desired results...
I read this on the recommendation that this book was like the TV show Mad Men. There's no Don Draper in this book, but this gives you a similar feel of the times and the trappings. ( )

The movie is breathtaking and devastating, but the book is even more so. ( )

The movie is breathtaking and devastating, but the book is even more so. ( )

The movie is breathtaking and devastating, but the book is even more so. ( )

A flawlessly written American tragedy in the tradition of The Great Gatsby. While the book reverberates with misguided snobbery, the story of two suburban lives of quiet desperation is fluid and captivating. The characters are animate. The dialogue is rich and full. The emotion is palpable. ( )

Amazingly well written. You "watch" rather than read this book. A couple trying to live the suburbian dream in the mid 50's feel the frustration of not fulfilling their lives and selling out. ( )

This book is an intense look at the life of a married couple during the late 1950s America. It examines their frustrated endeavours to rise above what they perceive as the mediocrity of their suburban existence, their moral dilemmas and the discontent they both feel in their assigned roles as breadwinner and housewife. I found it strangely disturbing ( )

Mark Bramhall is an excellent reader, conveying the deep emotional content of this story perfectly. Yates opens his book with great descriptive writing and then almost immediately brings his characters to the forefront. This is a mature coming-of-age story, looking at marriage, friendship, work, infidelity and more. So well done that it's hard to believe that this is a first novel. It's definitely worthy of all the past and current praise it has received. I probably won't see the movie as I don't want to do anything that might take away from the reading experience. ( )

Uncompromisingly brutal. Yates incisively dissects the shallowness behind the American intelligentsia class; rebellion for the sake of rebellion never felt so empty and self-delluding. And yet you want these characters to find their own paths because one sees oneself in them, even as they make one's skin crawl. The only weakness is in plotting. It's episodic and lacks focus; as a road it meanders, but the realism is incredible.” ( )

Fiction in the grand old tragic style. People with dreams, self-aware and aware of the compromises they "must" make, real dialogue, straighforward narrative...I loved this book! You can see where Russell Banks, Richard Ford, Richard Price (and many others, I'm sure) may have all been inspired by Richard Yates. It was so refreshing to read a book that wasn't meant to showcase the author's cleverness, but rather to truly capture a piece of real life. ( )

Fiction in the grand old tragic style. People with dreams, self-aware and aware of the compromises they "must" make, real dialogue, straighforward narrative...I loved this book! You can see where Russell Banks, Richard Ford, Richard Price (and many others, I'm sure) may have all been inspired by Richard Yates. It was so refreshing to read a book that wasn't meant to showcase the author's cleverness, but rather to truly capture a piece of real life. ( )

Fiction in the grand old tragic style. People with dreams, self-aware and aware of the compromises they "must" make, real dialogue, straighforward narrative...I loved this book! You can see where Russell Banks, Richard Ford, Richard Price (and many others, I'm sure) may have all been inspired by Richard Yates. It was so refreshing to read a book that wasn't meant to showcase the author's cleverness, but rather to truly capture a piece of real life. ( )

Please, if you haven't seen the film yet (and friends tell me it's all right, if not great) then do yourself a favor and read this book, which I can say unequivocally is bloody brilliant -- agonizing, horrifying, sad as hell; a long silent scream of desperation -- but brilliant.

Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a couple living on the ragged edge of seething discontent, set in the Connecticut suburbs of the 1950s. (And if you see the seeds of inspiration for the equally brilliant television show Mad Men, well, I'm with you. I would be fascinated to know how much the writers turned to Yates.) Frank and April Wheeler pride themselves on being intellectually and culturally superior to their neighbors, and plan, in a sort of frenzied escape plan, to relocate to Paris where Frank can "find himself".

I am, I must confess, a fan of rather dark literature, and nobody does it like Yates. Unsentimental, razor sharp, and unsparing to the point of cruelty, Yates' work was autobiographical, which makes it all the more poignant, I think. Although an author's work should stand alone, and require the reader to know nothing more than appears on the page, it is undeniable that understanding Yates lived through the drunken suburban malaise about which he writes so evocatively provides an even sharper shadow. I read Blake Bailey's biography of Yates some years ago, and found it touching and sad and illuminating. Yates certainly did not spare himself in his portrayal of male characters - they are every bit as troubled, selfish, immature, inconsiderate and sexually insecure as Yates himself appears to have been. And the author's life was far from glamorous; his living quarters are described in Bailey's book thusly:

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Thanks. ( )

Frank and April Wheeler are a young married couple who have recently moved their young family from New York City to the Connecticut suburbs. They see themselves as a cut above the typical 1955 suburbanite. Evenings with their friends Milly & Shep Campbell are spent discussing "sophisticated" topics and mutually reinforcing their status. The book opens with April's lead role in a community theater production -- an attempt to bring culture to their community. The play is a colossal failure. Frank and April's reactions to failure are early indicators of the tension between them.

The Wheelers spend enormous energy keeping up appearances, striving to maintain their image as a perfect family. Frank has a job in the city, as a cog in the wheel of Knox Business Machines. Frank is a master at avoiding work, and is astonished and somewhat uneasy when one of his more hastily-produced promotional pieces attracts the attention of higher-ups. Yates brilliantly satirizes the 1950s workplace, with its complex hierarchy and endless paper-pushing:
As he did each day (or rather on the days when he bothered with the IN basket, for there were many days when he left it alone) he tried first to see how many papers he could get rid of without actually reading their contents. Some could be thrown away, others could be almost as rapidly disposed of by scrawling "What about this?" in their margins, with his initials, and sending them to Bandy ... but the danger here was that the same papers might come back in a few days marked "Do" from Bandy ... A safer course was to mark a thing "File" for Mrs. Jorgenson and the girls, after the briefest possible glance had established that it wasn't of urgent importance ... (p. 89-90)

April, meanwhile, manages the household and minds the children. To friends and neighbors, they appear to have achieved the American Dream. And then, April decides they should move to Europe, where Frank can "find himself" while April puts her administrative skills to use in the role of family breadwinner. Their friends are astonished and skeptical, and begin to find the Wheelers increasingly boring as they become focused on the next stage in their lives.

And then things begin to unravel. I'll avoid spoilers, but suffice to say just when you think it can't get any worse, it does. Frank and April's relationship takes a dive of epic proportions, with widespread consequences. And when I suddenly saw where the whole thing was going, I was both riveted and deeply saddened. Yates' writing was just as effective in capturing the emotional turmoil of these two characters as he was in his satire. Highly recommended. ( )

2 American couples and their relationships. One couple decide to relocate to Paris, with tragic consequences. Well written book. ( )

very well-written book that conveys people and times well. The movie was very simiilar to the book, and maybe it helped that I saw the movie first, but Yates was such a thoughtful, engaging writer. ( )

I enjoyed this well-written lancinating pain-fest of a novel. I have read it amidst its resurgence in popularity due to the recent movie; but really it is an older book, wriiten in the early 1960's, set in 1950's Connecticut suburbia. Depicting an extreme version of the angst maybe all of us who are married and "settled" feel at some point. Is this really the life I've chosen?

The story of Frank and April Wheeler's marital crisis is told in a gripping, tense, almost uncomfortable fashion. Not only are we privy to their thoughts and words during their often pressured, emotional arguements but we get to hear fragments of things they wish they had said, imagined converstions, memories. This leads to excellent characterization with poignant renderings of even ancillary characters. I especially enjoyed Mrs.Givings - her nervousness just leapt of the page. Everything did really -- whiskey, ciggarettes, perfume, hoarse tired voices, tears -- the scenes came alive.

It fell short of 5 stars for me only because April grated on me, and I began to lose sympathy for her - though I am not sure I was supposed to. It is also a bit outside of what I usually read - there is only so much family drama I can take. But the 1950's setting was refreshing -- thank God they weren't texting each other, or running back and forth to their kids soccer games in the SUV. It potentially would have been repulsive to me in a modern setting - not quite sure why.

Anyway, a great read; be prepared to squirm and look away with empathetic embarrassment, frustration, sadness. I look forward to the movie. ( )

A story about a marriage during the 50's in a time when life was great but not so for this couple. If you liked the movie "War of the Roses" then you will like this book and movie. I wanted to read the book before I saw the movie. Needless to say I won't be renting the movie! ( )

I felt curiously let down by this book; perhaps because of the praises and superlatives heaped on it in the cover blurb and in the introduction, I was expecting too much. Yes, it was cleverly written, a convincing vision of the hell that is suburban stagnation and suffocation and an uncanny prediction of the way all our lives might be headed if we're not careful .

But it never seemed to me to become more than the sum of its parts, and the characters didn't seem to grow or develop or to reach any sort of understanding about themselves, they merely followed their unhappy trajectories to the end of the novel without one moment of satori. After a promising start, I felt disengaged and disappointed by the end and relieved to be free of Frank and April's all-consuming self indulgence and self pity. ( )

In short, Revolutionary Road is the great suburban novel. Frank and April, a young married couple, have sold out their dreams for a nice house in a pleasant Connecticut suburb. But they're dying inside. Can their dreams of a special life, a life that is worthy of their undeniable uniquenesses, be rekindled?

Yates's prose is fluid, intense and compelling. I haven't seen the movie, and after reading this, I don't want to. I don't think I'd like to tolerate any simplification or distortion of Yates's bittersweet vision.

I recommend this book highly. ( )

A fantastic book about a young suburban couple in 1950's America. Even as I was reading it I knew I wanted to read it again. The words and sentences are a delight to read. ( )

What a beautifully written book! The prose is just breath-taking. Now I really want to see the movie, too. I would recommend this book to anyone who looks for great contemporary novels. ( )