Richard Yates

In the critical discussion about Revolutionary Road, the highly-esteemed novel by Richard Yates, hardly any attention has been paid to the way in which failed search for identity, rather than the stereotypized deadness of American suburban environment, contribute to the doomed development of the Wheelers, the couple featured in the story. The paper is going to relate the failure of Frank and April to make their suburban existence work to their inability to accept the postwar narrative of middle-class suburbia as conformist heaven. The story of their downfall is situated within the discourse of identity-seeking while the discrepancy between the idyllic surface and identity crises of individual suburbanites is being highlighted. Ultimately, the paper aims to provide a fresh reading of a classic suburban tragedy.

This essay is an annotated compilation of the various factors that have prevented
Richard Yates of achieving full appreciation, and from enjoying critical acclaim and popular
recognition. It acknowledges Yates’s relevance to world literature and his influence in the
American literary scene. The text also discusses the repercussions and side-effects of writing
about universal and timeless values no one wants to hear, admit, or identify; as provided by the
opinions and arguments that specialized critics offered for consideration

While Liminality was initially a technical term in Van Gennep, then idealised by Turner, in the work of Arpad Szakolczai it appears as a diagnosis of crucial problems within modernity. Moving from sources in social theory and philosophy to literature, particularly novels, it appears that liminality becomes permanentised within modernity, leading to excesses of subversion, constant theatricality and irresolvable crises. Extending these reflections here, I examine Sandor Marai's The Rebels as a novelistic diagnosis of the collapse of society into chronic liminality in rebellious youth culture after the first world war. These themes occur again in Revolutionary Road in the context of post second world war American suburbia. While these initial way-markers were outstanding novels, now even contemporary mainstream dystopian films are now uneasy about theatricality and constant visibility, critical subversion and heroised transgression; these tendencies are exemplified in The Hunger Games, The Circle, The Matrix, Fight Club and many others. Yet, while fiction re-imagines and diagnoses the paradoxical problems of the contemporary world, these sources are also widely read as endorsements of permanent liminality as a way of being, where subversion, theatricality and crisis are not only good, but inevitable – theorised ahistorically as the essence of humankind.

This paper will use the film adaptation of Yates’ debut novel to interrogate the long-held critical perception of him as a mere realist. It will examine a number of key scenes in the film adaptation of Revolutionary Road in order to note the significant aesthetic changes made in turning the novel into a film, including the loss of Yates’ careful irony which makes nearly all the characters ambiguous, and in particular the change from self-reflexively performative characters in the novel to realist characters overshadowed by a theatrical use of lighting in the film by the director Sam Mendes.


This approach will be briefly located within Mendes’ body of work to suggest that his theatrical style fails when applied to Yates’ text because it elides the very theatricality of the characters in that text. It will be argued that Yates’ text is problematic to film because, inspired as it is by F Scott Fitzgerald, it is more akin to Modernism rather than realism or the semiotic amoral novel of manners suggested by Jerome Klinkowitz. Mendes’ adaptation, in fetishising the clothes and furnishings of the 1950s, could be held to be the cinematic equivalent of Jerome Klinkowitz’s interpretation of Yates’ works as prioritising the aesthetic appearance of actions over the emotional and moral meaning of those actions.


It will thus be argued that Revolutionary Road cannot be successfully filmed in a style of straightforward realism by locating it beside Francis Ford Coppola’s screenplays for The Great Gatsby and Apocalypse Now which grappled with varying success with adapting novels dominated by interior rather than exterior action, a fluid approach to time and identity, and a concern with prose style over plot development. Revolutionary Road’s film adaptation thus complicates received notions of Yates as realist.

in Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines, “The USA: Models, Counter-Models”,
S. Bauer, S. Chauvin, D. Kesselman (eds.), no. 145, 2015, p. 55-66.

In the work of such post-war American novelists as Richard Yates, Philip Roth, or Richard Ford, prior realist models of “natural” emotionality are presented as a cultural and aesthetic myth. In Yates’s Revolutionary Road, Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, or Ford’s The Sportswriter, the quest for “real-world” emotionality remains fundamentally elusive. In its place, we see emerge a counter-model: a rhetorical interplay of affective suppositions in which neither author, character nor reader is able to determine the authentic, natural or original quality of the emotional states being explored.

This paper offers a comparative reading of Richard Yates' novel Disturbing the Peace and short story A Glutton for Punishment and John McGahern's novel The Pornographer and short story Oldfashioned. These 1970s novels received a tepid critical reception, but this paper argues that not only do their use of meta-textuality complicate that reception, but in addition to running intriguingly parallel in their methods, both novels offer an oblique criticism of 1970s consumerism.

Common Ground Conference 2018 - Queen's University, Belfast.

This paper analyses how space as both a physical environment and a social construct affects what Judith Butler calls ‘gender regulations’: how does the intersection of the private and the public influences the development of personal identity? How can these stereotypes be challenged within the confines of structured social hierarchies?
The notion of suburbia as a response to a post-World-War-II crisis in masculinity is introduced. In particular, the paper looks at how a male authoritarian rhetoric that sees happiness as a commodity rejects the idea of individual identity and serves to generate the conventional role of the all-American housewife as the only aspiration for female characters. Through an investigation into the development of different female characters, the paper then highlights the ways in which adherence to the suburban social norm that regulates gender relationships leads to a renunciation of personhood in favour of conformity and designates the ostracisation of April Wheeler as an outcast. The semiotics of female identity that surrounds the character of April are examined to show how this ostracisation is not only an external process of separation form society, but becomes an internalised action that leads to a fracture in the female consciousness.

The article probes the social background to the controversial ‘Kitchen Debate’ between the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the US vice-president Richard Nixon, which occured at the American trade exhibition in Moscow during summer 1959.  Political histories narrowly focus on diplomatic point-scoring between the two leaders, leaving largely untouched the purpose of the landmark exhibition, and its expression of America's ‘suburban’ values.  This discussion traces a broad arc exploring:

- The exchange between Khrushchev and Nixon, especially their discussion of housing
- What was shown in the Moscow exhibition (detailing the display kitchen that prompted Khrushchev’s indignation), and the US State Department’s broad aims.
- The expansion of suburbia in post-war America (census figures quoted), and changes in property development including the emergence of commuter suburbs.
- The influential Levittown model for mass home construction & instant suburbs, and the impact of its highly publicised estates on Long Island, Connecticutt and New Jersey.
- Nature and extent of suburban conformism, including pointed criticisms made by urban planning commentators, the sociologist William Whyte, and the Feminist Betty Friedan.
- Mounting distress of women who did not feel fulfilled as homemakers, and their main grievances.
- Segregation, and enforced racial exclusion at the Levittowns.
- Portrayal of suburban values in the key literary works, ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’ (1955), ‘Revolutionary Road’ (1961), ‘The Stepford Wives’ (1972)
- Efforts to raise the quality of home and suburb design in California, prompted by the magazine ‘Arts and Architecture’
- The pioneering Case Study House project.
- Role of the Los Angeles firm Eames Office in post-war domestic design.
- Contribution of Eames Office to the Moscow exhibition.
9pp.

From ‘Great Hedges’ to Washington Square, Iowa City to London, geographical spaces in Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade seek to impose their presence on the surrounding chaos, whether in embodying the blunt reality of failure or in holding out false promises of untapped potential. The novel begins in New Jersey, where the newly-divorced Pookie attempts ‘to launch a career in suburban real estate’. Revolutionary Road has taught us to be wary of suburbia – and, indeed, Pookie is the embodiment of William Upksi Wimsatt’s definition of the suburbs as being ‘founded on fear, conformity, shallowness of character, and dullness of imagination’. In her search for ‘an elusive quality she called “flair”’, she sets her two daughters on migratory pathways, which for Sarah ends in domestic violence and death (she becomes a sort of perverse Rapunzel, trapped by her handsome prince within the claustrophobic foliage of ‘Great Hedges’ in Long Island), and for Emily, despite early promise, ends in penury and limbo, partway between a small, cheap apartment in New York’s West Twenties, and a driveway in Edwardstown, New Hampshire.

Geographic space in The Easter Parade is never neutral; as in a fairytale, it is always dramatic, imbued with power, and suggestive of a state of mind. Location by location, from Tenafly to downtown New York, the bewildered Emily is stripped of her dreams, but never her masochistic curiosity – each new place marks a futile step toward the understanding she is still seeking at the novel’s close. The reader travels with her, dogged by Yates’s gloomy opening pronunciation that ‘neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life’ but reluctant to accept its finality.  Focussing on Emily’s retarded progress throughout the novel (and using GIS mapping to illustrate it), this chapter will argue that The Easter Parade is shaped by its geography, which is always something more (or other) than mere built environment. Combining close textual analysis with theories of urban sociology and culture (Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Richard Lehan and Matthew Beaumont), I will suggest that geographical spaces in this novel foster the existential loneliness Yates diagnosed in ‘most human beings’ (‘therein lies their tragedy’).