A few months ago I wrote about the frustrations of being an editor (and the frustrated diatribes launched at said editors by unpublished authors). I noted in that post, that the common complaint that there are too many books being published these days causing great novels to be overlooked entirely. So, what then is the excuse for the highly-acclaimed but thoroughly ignored works of Richard Yates? Yates' first novel, published in 1961 (when there weren't 4,000 works of fiction published a year), Revolutionary Road, is a contradiction of these fears. As with so many of my favorite writers, he is one of the most accessible of scribes. His work functions at the top of the literary scale with a mastery of form and structure without the acrobatic linguistics of those authors I love to hate, but will not name again here.
Revolutionary Road was a huge success at its time of publication and stood along such classics as Catch-22 and The Moviegoer for the National Book Award that year (and now one of Time magazine's top All-Time 100 Novels). Yet, Yates, for all of the accolades he received from such heavyweights as Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, and Tennessee Williams (and even as a first-time author, he was indeed, their peer), barely ever broke the 10,000 copy sales mark--numbers that might not even get him published in today's market. So what of this? How is it that a scribe with a skill at chronicling the post-Baby Boom high of middle-class America that can be matched only by Raymond Carver and John Cheever found not one but all of his books out of print just a few decades later? What does that say about our industry? What does that say about readers? Is there any place on the shelves for a true writer's writer?
I myself was only recenly made aware of Yates, and that discovery was entirely accidental. I am embarrassingly (and eternally grateful) for Amazon's (normally off-the-wall bad) recommendations pages for this. For Yates is my kind of writer. His stories are unfussy and his sentences are lacking entirely in pretension. Yates' style is so simple, he might even fight for space near Bukowski in my regard for his ability to say a profound thing in a simple way. To write with the skill and eye that Yates did, and then to be entirely removed from literary memory is, frankly, terrifying. I think authors believe (as they should) that if they write well enough, their stories and the world of those stories will live on in paperback for all eternity. So, how is it that Richard Yates, a 
writer so obviously talented, so universally respected by his peers found his novels (his brilliant, life-defining, wrenching novels) out of print just a few years after they left the presses? A mystery, certainly.
In any event, luckily, some of his titles were recently reissued, and I stumbled across his first novel, Revolutionary Road. I came across it at a particularly prescient time in my life as the book tells the story of the excruciating slow erosion of a marriage--the Wheelers, a suburban couple who believe they are smarter and better than their neighbors and too good for the mundane lives they have found themselves in. Husband Frank works a boring job in a nondescript office, but dreams of moving to Europe to become a writer; April, his wife, is his booster, the core of his self-confidence; she is "first-rate," or so he must remind himself. Of Frank, Yates writes that, "he hardly ever entertained a doubt of his own exceptional merit," while never having actually ever accomplished anything of significance, by having avoided "specific goals he had [also] avoided specific limitations." As a couple, Frank and April are constantly watching themselves, gauging their lives against the ideals of their peers. Theirs is a self-conscious anxiety, one full of the fear of never knowing precisely how they are expected to behave. They paralyze themselves by playing at their roles of husband and wife and mother and father--exhausted in their attempts to not blow their lines, all the while silently seething at each other across emptier and quieter rooms.
While Revolutionary Road's cynical view of the American Dream might seem trite in today's world, it is how Yates allows us to sympathize with two very unsympathetic (and very recognizable) characters that strikes you. The lament of life in the suburbs and consumerism, is ahead of its time, but more incredibly, is how he shows these things to affect their (and our) humanity--how it builds frustrations and self-conscious sorrow, and allows us to unapologetically place blame for all of it on those we love. The main characters revel in their disdain for the banal and are repulsed when they realize, that in the end, they aspire to the same. It is this failure, through no fault other than their lack of imagination, that Yates shows us--he takes us into their inner lives and allows us to contemplate that absence. It is this merciless view of his characters that makes Yates' writing so compelling. You cannot but recognize the disappointments they suffer. But there is no relief for the reader, no punchline at the end of the humiliation. Worse, is that Yates empowers his characters, there is never a point at which they would be unable to pull themselves out of the depths--they simply continue down the path they have already decided they despise, unwilling perhaps, to acknowledge their mistake and try again.
A bleak vision, certainly--as it accounts not for some foreign history or fantastical horror story--but one that is easily envisioned as we wait for the next train to arrive at the platform. And it is this blunt reality of failure--the view that family and love are not only difficult, but sometimes near impossible--that captured me more than I have ever been by an author. To read a story that understands that sometimes there is no luck, or happy coincidence to spare us, was a revelation and oddly, a reward, for for having survived it at all.
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