Revolutionary Road

What are you supposed to do when you have everything you are told you should want and you find it isn't at all what you expected it would be?  How are you to keep from going insane with dissatisfaction? Where is the "terrific sense of life" you are desiring to feel more than anything?  Your youth and all its promises are fading, your attempts to live are fleeting, and you feel trapped in a life going no where.  

Frank and April Wheeler, though on the outside,  are the picture of 1950's perfection, are inwardly horribly flawed and flailing characters that struggle against each other and them selves in Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road.  They suffer under those questions every day.  Though they make great attempts to rise above their defeatist mindset, they find it so laborious and so taxing on their relationship to do so, that their efforts are unsustainable.  The inevitable return to reality results in such bitter disappointment that their life becomes unbearable.  Their days are so frustratingly confined in conformity that the story eventually turns tragic.  The Wheelers are a couple in crisis, surrounded by others in crisis, all trying to maintain the happy facade we all know was characteristic of the 1950's. 

Revolutionary Road is layered with thought provoking, disturbing and hauntingly precise descriptions and prose.  It is a book I would recommend but with a disclaimer.  It is not a "feel good" read, as you could probably tell, but it is a book that echoes sentiments that will forever remain questioned and challenged.  It is a book that causes one to take an evaluating look at their own life, their goals, hopes, desires and realities.  

I hope that you enjoy the road as much as I did.

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