Theculturecafe

I had never heard of Richard Yates, before picking one of his books at the airport, en route to Basle. I see some similarities between Yates' life and Frank Wheeler, one of the main protagonists, in Revolutionary Road. Yates, like Frank moved home on a regular basis during his childhood, he served in France during the Second World War, where we see Frank planning a new life with his family to escape the daily grin of suburbia. It took me sometime to get into the story and read through the bliss of domestic life that April is pretending to live, at some point Yates describes her, on a mission to scrub the house free, from every piece of dirt and dust, the typical job of a stepford wife. Once I read through their ordinary life and moved along the pages, where tension starts to build up and old wounds crack open, I became completly hooked on the book and find it hard to put down. If April is a devoted wife, we can see the premices of an independent woman but she  rapidly resigns herself to her fate. Frank is trying to pretend to be the hero April would like him to be and therefore gives her false hopes while he ends up being a coward. I really enjoy reading about April and Frank, even if I feel really sorry for them, even more so for April.