The same year Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened, Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road was nominated for the National Book Award. “This novel locates the new American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage,” wrote Alfred Kazin in a blurb used on the original book jacket. The novel is about the Wheelers, a couple who first meet at a party in Manhattan. April is an aspiring actress, and Frank, a longshoreman with a college degree, talks of his ambition to become a writer. Both express the desire to live unique and original lives. They marry, one thing leads to another, and we find them settled in conventional suburban Connecticut with a house and two kids. Frank commutes daily to his job in the city as a junior executive in a large corporation, and April fulfills the domestic obligations of a housewife and mother—so quickly have they conformed to a version of the American dream that was not what they intended.
Yates puts his finger on the existential heart of the novel in a conversation between Frank and a lunch guest. Frank condemns “the hopeless emptiness of everything in this country,” and his visitor eagerly agrees: “Now you’ve said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that’s all we ever talked about. We’d sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said ‘hopeless,’ though; that’s where we’d chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness.”
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