RICHARD YATES’S 1961 novel, “Revolutionary Road,” is far from the kind of property that typically becomes a big Hollywood movie, especially one starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in their first post-“Titanic” outing together. For one thing, the book is set back in the mid-20th century — an era that, until “Mad Men” came along to exhume it, was thought to have about as much entertainment potential as the Bronze Age. The story requires armies of boring fedora-wearing commuters to disembark from Grand Central every morning. The characters wear dopey clothes and drive boatlike cars, and everyone drinks and smokes too much — even pregnant women.
François Duhamel/DreamWorks LLC
Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in Sam Mendes’s film “Revolutionary Road,” based on a novel by Richard Yates.
Nor does it help that “Revolutionary Road” is among the bleakest books ever written. It ends unhappily, with a gruesome death, and neither of the main characters is entirely likable to begin with. Partly autobiographical, the novel tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, who in the mid-1950s move with their two children to the ’burbs (the movie was shot on location in Darien, Conn., a good deal more upscale than the Wheelers’ town) and from the minute they get there hold themselves apart.
On no particular evidence the Wheelers consider themselves full of unrealized potential. Frank (drawing on Yates’s experience as a sometime copywriter for Remington Rand) works for Knox Business Machines at what he calls “the dullest job you can possibly imagine,” but thinks of himself as an intellectual, an “intense, nicotine-stained Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man.”
April, like Yates’s first wife, Sheila, has theatrical aspirations, and it’s she who comes up with the solution to their depressing, unfulfilled lives: they’ll chuck everything and move to Paris, where she’ll get a well-paying secretarial job until Frank “finds” himself. For Frank, who has meanwhile begun a grubby affair with a young woman at the office, the plan is an agreeable pipe dream, but April is in deadly earnest about it, and the marriage proceeds to unravel with the inexorableness of Greek tragedy. Watching them is like rubbernecking at a car wreck.
“I’m pretty surprised it ever got made,” Blake Bailey, Yates’s biographer, said recently about the movie version, scheduled to open Dec. 26. “It has long been an ambition in Hollywood to make a movie that’s the last word on postwar suburban malaise, but like any highly nuanced work of literary art, ‘Revolutionary Road’ is awfully hard to translate onto the screen.”
By all accounts, that the movie did get made is owing mostly to the drive and enthusiasm of Ms. Winslet, who was taken with the script from the moment she read it. “I loved the emotional nakedness, the brutal honesty about what can sometimes happen in a marriage,” she said in an interview. “And also all the minor characters are so good.”
She began lobbying Mr. DiCaprio, she recalled, after slipping him the script over coffee, and she also worked on Sam Mendes, the director. He was an easier sell in some ways, because he happens to be her husband. “I just told him, ‘Babe, you’ve got to do this,’ ” Ms. Winslet said.
What none of the principals knew then is that for all its gloominess, or maybe even because of it, “Revolutionary Road” is a novel cherished by a passionate and protective coven of admirers (including, incidentally, Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men”) who pass it along, the novelist Richard Ford has said, like a secret literary handshake. They cherish its honesty, its uncompromising exactness, the austere beauty of its prose.
But despite its many champions, the book has slipped in and out of print, never quite catching on with a wider audience, and it would probably amuse and irritate the author in equal measure to know that it has been reissued in a movie tie-in edition. (There is also a new Everyman’s Library omnibus volume that includes “The Easter Parade,” another of Yates’s novels, and “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness,” a collection of stories.)
Though he would have hated the term, Yates was a writer’s writer, or even a writer’s writer’s writer. He was extravagantly admired by his peers and by many critics; but popular success, which he cared about more than he let on, maddeningly eluded him. He was dogged by bad luck — “Revolutionary Road,” his first novel and also his best, was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award but lost to “The Moviegoer” by Walker Percy — and bad timing. At a time when postmodernism and meta-fiction were starting to become fashionable, he clung to the realist tradition of his models Fitzgerald and Flaubert.
Yates could also be his own worst enemy, courtly and cavalier at times but at other times bitter and self-inflated, and after the breakup of two marriages he became almost a caricature of the alcoholic, self-destructive American writer. Gaunt and stooped, perpetually broke, he lived in a series of rented rooms in New York, Boston and Tuscaloosa, Ala., with squashed cockroaches underfoot. By the end of his life he was doing little else but smoke (even when attached to an oxygen tank), cough, drink and write. He died in 1992 at 66, though he seemed much older.
Yates used to say he hated the movies. But like so many Americans of his generation he was imaginatively shaped by them, and like a lot of writers in search of extra money he did a couple of purgatorial stints in Hollywood. He adapted William Styron’s “Lie Down in Darkness” for John Frankenheimer — the film was never made, but the script was good enough to be printed, years later, in a literary magazine — and he got a screenwriting credit (though he disowned it) for the 1969 war film “The Bridge at Remagen.” Near the end of his life he even tried some scripts for David Milch, a former student who was then producing “Hill Street Blues.”
So he knew his way around Hollywood sufficiently to be skeptical about the movie prospects of “Revolutionary Road.” Right after the book came out, Sam Goldwyn Jr. expressed interest. But Yates wrote later: “Cooler heads in his organization decided that the moviegoing public ‘is not ready for a story of such unrelieved tragedy.’ ... Sic transit the hell Gloria.
