Speaking of life in 1950s America, I saw "Revolutionary Road" a few months ago and was very taken with it. So I finally picked up the book by Richard Yates, thinking I'd get to it when I finished the several others I've started. I began reading the first page yesterday just to see how it started, and now I'm on page 220. I can't put it down. It's probably the best thing I've read about domestic life in that era. The writing is so clear and moving and seemingly effortless. I never feel, as I did with Bellow, that I'm on the verge of "getting it" but not quite. I get it.
Yates said this of his book:
"I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witchhunts. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that — felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit — and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties."
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