Revolutionary Road is the story of our times

There are some writers who, whatever their initial reputation, drift from the public consciousness, the flame kept alive by readers and fellow writers who feel honour bound to introduce friends into what can quickly risk becoming a priesthood of the initiates. Richard Yates was one such. His first book, Revolutionary Road, appeared in 1961 and was nominated for the National Book Award.
 
He wrote other books, including the impressive The Easter Parade (1976), but print runs were usually abbreviated. Magazines showed little interest in his short stories. His work went out of print, was resurrected, faded away.

He suffered from depression, smoked, and fuelled himself with more alcohol than was good for him. When he died, in 1992, he was reduced to carrying a portable oxygen tank because of lungs ruined by TB and emphysema.

Since then he has been largely forgotten. But not by everyone. Kurt Vonnegut was an admirer, Richard Ford declared a debt to him and in Britain David Hare waved a banner. And, of course, Sam Mendes has made a film version of that first, great novel.

The film of Revolutionary Road has won few plaudits from the critics nor taken many awards in the long prize-giving season that culminates on Sunday with the Oscars. But it has at least put more paperbacks on shelves and given another generation of readers the chance to have the air sucked out of their lungs by Yates's prose. Because the world he describes - suburban New England, as the 1950s edged into the 1960s - ­ is hermetic.

The central characters are the Wheelers, moving grudgingly into their thirties, aware at some level that they have failed while unable to identify the precise nature of that failure. They move into Revolutionary Road, one of those modern developments which never quite assure those who live there that they have arrived at whatever destination they imagined themselves to aspire to.

A schizophrenic man is one of the only characters to name things as they are

Frank thinks of himself as a "kind of Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man," as well he might as beneath him is an existential void. He has enough awareness to be conscious of inadequacy but not enough to understand his responsibility for it. His wife sees herself as a support operation until, suddenly, she does not and their world begins its slow collapse.

There are hints of Sinclair Lewis here, as there is of the Ernest Hemingway of the short stories (Yates uses the word 'brilliantly' as only Hemingway had done to convey a sense of an inappropriate emotional response). These, though, are no more than nods of acknowledgement. The world Yates creates is his own. He draws a portrait of a society which lacks transcendence, lacks even an awareness of what that might be. His are characters who perform their lives but they are no better at doing so than April Wheeler is when she appears in the amateur dramatics which open the book.
 
Both of them hazard an affair, though without passion which is altogether too positive a feeling. They are adrift. They have children but make no real connection with them, shipping them off to acquaintances so that they can indulge themselves in the rows which are a substitute for contact.

A neighbour's adult schizophrenic son is one of the only characters to name things as they are, to ignore the curious decorum which passes for sociability, and he is incarcerated for his pains.

They are aware that they are trapped, that the grace of their bodies is beginning to fade, that their ambitions have been compromised and their visions dulled. They are not so much living their lives as waiting them out until April takes it into her mind to kill her child in the womb, though whether that is a gesture towards freedom of a sorts or some final act of capitulation is not clear, especially, it seems, to her.

The book ends as a character turns off his hearing aid, choosing silence over the vapid chatter which passes for communication in Revolutionary Road.

And if the rest is not silence then it is no more than a suspiration, a prolonged sigh over an America which seems to have lost any sense of purpose or direction. As Yates himself explained, the title was intended to invoke the revolutionary spirit of 1776, the best, brave spirit of change and possibility now come to a dead end in 50s America.

Well, that is nearly half a century ago. So does Yates's novel offer anything more than a footnote to an American complacency and conformity that has surely long since disappeared? You will detect a rhetorical question.

Nearly a decade deep into the 21st century, with capitalism in freefall and no one confidently stepping forward to explain what has gone wrong or how we might proceed, that same lack of direction, that same absence of transcendence, that same sense of an obdurate failure mocks us all.

Yates was something more than a poèt maudit. He was a moral surgeon dissecting the world we still inhabit. ·