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Terfex.com - Revolutionary Road (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Vintage Contemporaries)
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $10.17
Your Save: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307454621
ISBN: 0307454622
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 2008-11-25
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2008-11-25
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble.
With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Watch the movie don't read the book
Comment: This book is nothing like the preview for the movie that is out now. It is slow and wordy !
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nicely written novel about a bunch of losers
Comment: I just finished this book. I've given it three stars because to Yates' credit, it's a well written, vividly descriptive book--about a bunch of miserable people who stubbornly insist on being unhappy. Frank and April Wheeler are a married couple who would have been better off as lovers for no more than a day or two. They're living the American Dream and yet, all they see fit to do is complain and argue about the stupidest things. April is an unstable mess who let herself get in a situation she never really wanted, and Frank is a yellow-belly coward and a weakling. All they care about is keeping up appearances and are all too willing to live a lie because neither really has the courage to make a REAL break. In my humble opinion, they deserve each other! Other than that, I have to say that Richard Yates is an insightful, sensitiver writer; however, if you read this book with the intention of becoming attached to either or both of the main characters, you'll be sorely disappointed. The Wheelers are amongst the most miserable, unlikeable, irritating characters you'll ever come across. Read this book, and after you're done hug and kiss your spouse(if you're actually in love with him or her, yeesh!)and be happy for the good things you have in life! And if it is the case that you're decidedly UNHAPPY with your life, don't flake out like Frank and April Wheeler did in their own ways--go out and do something about it!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Marvelous
Comment: Like many folks, it seems, I hadn't even HEARD of Richard Yates before seeing trailers for the film adaptation of this book. How is that possible? How are American letters so bass-ackward that he isn't on 'The List' of greats along with Updike, Pynchon, Fitzgerald and Stegner? I mean, I studied English Literature in college and never read the guy!
Okay, enough astonished protest. I'm also an obsessive fan of 'Mad Men,' which I now understand is so clearly influenced by this work that it's practically an adaptation in and of itself. The bitter world that Yates exposes resonates with us all, whether we are of the 50s, earlier or later generations; the facts remain the same. How Edith Wharton skewered society's tropes in the nineteenth century and Fitzgerald did the same to the 20s, I feel 'Revolutionary Road' does for the 50s. Yates is relentless in peeling back layer after layer of his characters' perceptions until they are left with nothing, and nothing is who they have become - or, perhaps, always were and just didn't know it. In a sense, it's like 50s gothic; this work is populated with wretches, leading wretched existences, only they see everything through the rose-colored glasses of glossy advertising and suburban dreams.
I would unreservedly recommend this work. Having become a fan of Ian McEwan's character studies (which is how I think of his books), I feel that Yates has the same intriguing touch; his observations on human nature are astute and unforgiving. A beautifully executed book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece
Comment: I can add nothing to the blurbs copied immediately below, except to say that they're all true:
"Having heard for years that Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road was one of the great but underappreciated American novels, I searched it out. I have spent the months since then pressing it into the hands of anybody who will take it." Richard Lacayo, introducing Time's 100 Best Novels.
"A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic." William Styron, on Revolutionary Road.
"The Great Gatsby of my time...one of the best books by a member of my generation." Kurt Vonnegut, on Revolutionary Road
Customer Rating:
Summary: Still Relevant, Always Real
Comment: I decided to read this book after hearing about the movie version being released starring Kate Winslet & Leonardo DiCaprio. The story is a quiet, stirring one that slowly twists itself until there is no resolution but to completely snap.
Essentially the book surrounds the lives of a 1950's young, married couple in their late 20s - April & Frank Wheeler - who realize they've somehow ended up giving up their youthful fantasies of living in Europe and doing something important with their lives in exchange for a comfortable life in the suburbs. April, a housewife struggling to the break the mould, spurs the couples' adventurous spirit again after her attempt to branch out fails spectacularly towards the beginning of the novel. Frank, settled in a thankless job at his own father's previous employer, loves to give off the aura of being successful and going places, but when challenged to follow through, seeks solace in exponentially dangerous ways.
As April & Frank seek to recapture their youthful vigour and passionate love for one another, the intensity of their emotions continue to highlight the cracks in their relationship until everything bubbles over into a dramatic conclusion.
Overall this is a good book - it's well-written, the characters are quite well-defined (even the minor ones) and easy to envision, and surprisingly, much of Frank & April's desperation not to settle or be 'one of them' (suburbanites) is completely relatable to the youth of today that are transitioning to the traditional roles of adulthood. The book isn't a page-turner in the classic sense (at least not till the end), but it's the anticipation that things can only go downhill that will keep you guessing and keep readers interested and emotionally involved to the very last page.
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