Ok, I haven’t seen the movie (with Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio) but in no way can it be half as good as the book! I’m talking about Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I don’t remember the last time a book gripped me quite like this. I mean, I was drop-jawed by the end of the first page and kept shaking my head as I read and read and read. The story is not ‘revolutionary’ at all but the magic comes from the way Yates notices everything: every nuance, every slight turn of the head, every hopeful glance and every crushing disappointment described with the ease of a master who is a keen observer of people and of plain ole ordinary life. 
I couldn’t wait to start another, so my next Yates book was A Special Providence. This is a story about a boy named Bob Prentice, a young soldier, who has spent his entire life trying to escape his mother’s stifling presence. Alice, his mother, struggles with her own hopes and demons as she tries to find meaning and success in her sculpture. Her husband left years ago and Bob and her art are all she has and she pursues both with achingly tragic results. You feel her desperation as one after another of her schemes die and she is forced to rise up and find another way to achieve something….for anything is better than what she has. Her life is a pitiful illusion and you feel yourself buying into it for awhile. Bob eventually goes to war in Europe at the end of WWII, hoping to become a man, a hero, but makes one bumbling disaster after another, never able to achieve much of anything while his mother waits at home for him to return and bring meaning back into her dreary life. It is a haunting story of loss and failure, one that leaves the reader wanting so much for these people. Yates has a way of making you care desperately for his characters.
I am at the end of a third book, entitled Cold Spring Harbor. This is the story of Evan Shephard and chronicles the half-lived life he doesn’t seem to mind living. How his indifference and just plain laziness plays out in the lives of people around him and what he does with roads not taken and challenges left unanswered takes you deep within a story that feels complex yet painfully simple.
I have several more of Richard Yates’s novels on my bed-side table: Disturbing the Peace, Easter Parade, and Young Hearts Crying. With the success of Revolutionary Road there has been a resurgence of interest in Yates and his books have been newly reprinted in paperback form. I’m not exactly sure why I have gravitated to him so strongly but rarely have I read dialog that strips characters down to their inner core like his does. The stories are simple and often tragic but it is the truths that he finds and the honesty with which he exposes people and ultimately the beauty he brings forth in the midst of the most ordinary existence that has captured my emotions…and …the man writes a darn good story!
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