Revolutionary Road

Our book group choice for October 2010 is Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. 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.

Revolutionary Road is a novel by Richard Yates about the lives of Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple living in the suburbs of Connecticut in the 1950s. The novel is set on Revolutionary Hill, a street of well-to-do homes where the Wheelers are the only ones who seem to be unhappy. Frank is a white-collar worker who is bored with his job and feels like he is not living up to his potential. April is a former actress who is frustrated with her role as a housewife and mother.

The novel opens with April starring in an amateur production of The Petrified Forest. The performance is a disaster, and April is humiliated. After the show, Frank and April have a fight on the side of the highway. Frank accuses April of being a failure, and April accuses Frank of being a coward.

The fight on the side of the highway is a turning point for the Wheelers. They realize that they are both unhappy with their lives, and they decide to make a change. They decide to move to Paris, where Frank will pursue his dream of becoming a writer and April will work to support them.

However, the Wheelers’ plans are not as easy to execute as they had hoped. Frank’s job does not transfer to Paris, and April has difficulty finding work. They are forced to move into a small apartment in a run-down neighborhood.

The Wheelers’ marriage begins to deteriorate under the strain of their new life. Frank becomes increasingly frustrated with his lack of success, and April becomes increasingly resentful of Frank’s lack of support. They begin to argue constantly, and their relationship becomes increasingly toxic.

In the end, the Wheelers’ dreams of a better life in Paris are shattered. They are forced to return to Connecticut, where they resume their old lives.

Revolutionary Road Discussion Questions

1. What is the significance of the novel’s title, “Revolutionary Road”? In what ways might it be read as an ironic commentary on mid-twentieth century American values?
2. Why does Yates begin the novel with the story of the play? In what ways does it set up some of the themes—disillusionment, self-deception, play-acting, etc.—that are developed throughout the novel?
3. Frank rails about the middle-class complacency of his neighbors in the Revolutionary Hill Estates. “It’s as if everybody’d made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let’s have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let’s all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality…and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we’ll all get busy and pretend it never happened” [pp. 68-69]. Is Frank’s critique of suburbia accurate? In what ways does Frank himself live in a state of self-deception? Why can he see so clearly the self-deception of others but not his own?
4. What ironies are involved in Frank going to work for the same firm his father worked for? What is Frank’s attitude toward his job and the fact that he’s walking in his father’s footsteps?
5. Describing a Negro couple holding hands at the mental hospital where John Givings has been confined, the narrator writes that “it wasn’t easy to identify the man as a patient until you noticed that his other hand was holding the chromium leg of the table in a yellow-knuckled grip of desperation, as if it were the rail of a heaving ship” [p. 296]. What do such precise and vivid physical descriptions—often highly metaphorical—add to the texture of the novel? Where else does Yates use such descriptions to reveal a character’s emotional state?
6. Revolutionary Road frequently—and seamlessly—moves between past and present, as characters drift in and out of reveries. (April’s childhood memory [pp. 321-326] is a good example). What narrative purpose do these reveries serve? How do they deepen the reader’s understanding of the inner lives of the main characters?
7. What roles do Frank’s affair with Maureen and April’s sexual encounter with Shep play in the outcome of the novel? Are they equivalent? What different motivations draw Frank and April to commit adultery?
8. Twice Frank talks April out of an abortion, and both times he later regrets having done so, admitting that he didn’t want the children any more than she did. What motivates him to argue so passionately against April aborting her pregnancies? What methods does he use to persuade her? Is John Givings right in suggesting that it’s the only way he can prove his manhood?
9. What role does John Givings play in the novel? Why is he such an important character, even though he appears in only two scenes? How does he move the action along?
10. How do Frank and April feel about Shep and Milly Campbell? What do they reveal about themselves in their attitudes toward their closest friends?
11. Before she gives herself a miscarriage, April leaves a note telling Frank not to blame himself if anything should happen to her. But is he to blame for April’s death? Why, and to what extent, might he be responsible?
12. The narrator writes, after April’s death, that “The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy” [p. 339]. In what ways is the novel tragic? What tragic flaws might be ascribed to both Frank and April? Why are the Revolutionary Hill Estates ill-suited to tragedy?
13. What is Yates suggesting by the fact that the only character in the novel who sees and speaks the truth has been confined to an insane asylum? Does John Givings’s‚ outsider status give him the freedom to speak the truth, or has his natural tendency toward telling the truth, however unpleasant it might be, landed him in a mental hospital?
14. Near the end of the novel, the narrator says of Nancy Brace, as she listens to Milly’s retelling of April’s death: “She liked her stories neat, with points, and she clearly felt there were too many loose ends in this one” [p. 345]. What is the problem with wanting stories to be “neat”? In what ways does Revolutionary Road circumvent this kind of overly tidy or moralistic reading? Does the novel itself present too many “loose ends”?
15. The novel ends with Mrs. Givings chattering on to her husband about how “irresponsible” and “unwholesome” the Wheelers were. What is the significance, for the novel as a whole, of the final sentences: “But from there on Howard Givings heard only a welcome, thunderous sea of silence. He had turned off his hearing aid”? [p. 355]. What symbolic value might be assigned to the plant that Mrs. Givings mentions at the end of the novel?
16. Revolutionary Road was first published in 1961. In what ways does it reflect the social and psychological realities of that period? In what ways does it anticipate and illuminate our own time?