say NO to the suburbs!

My mom (who is now a secret reader of this blog) made me promise that I would read Revolutionary Road before seeing the movie. And so I did. If you're out there, mother, hello! Now go make me egg salad. 

This book is incredible. Reading it is comparable to the experience of a tightly clenched fist full of quarters repeatedly punching you in the same meaty part of your arm for hours and hours. First, it's not so bad, you can take the pain. Whatever. Soon it will stop, and you'll be able to tend to the chores of the day. Raking, washing, the cleansing of the gutter. But then it doesn't stop, the pain, that is, and you start to get all tender and sore, and your skin starts melting into a purple blackish mess of a bruise, and then your eyes start watering, and your contacts dislodge themselves so you can't see what's actually happening, and the pain gets louder, and all you want to do is lie down on the couch and eat your Ham & Cheese hot-pocket, but the fist persists, until finally, your arm just kind of falls off at the point of entry, and you see that your blood really is warm, but it's staining the freshly cleaned carpet, and will obviously have to be replaced, except you ran out of gas six days ago, and IKEA is DEFINITELY not in walking distance. So. Reading Revolutionary Road was kind of like that. In the best way possible.

It's about the suburbs, in the 50's, and the terribly terribly unhappy people that live there. Nothing monumentally exciting happens in this book. No giant plot twists. No rapist aliens. To some, that would seem a disappointment. But, I loved it. The way in which it's written is so good, full of these amazingly tight, claustrophobic sentences and paragraphs. It's told mainly through the point of view of Leo DiCaprio's character, but every once in a while, Richard Yates seamlessly jumps into the mind of the wife, or the children, or the real estate agent, which turns out to be a very cool method of storytelling. It was just an incredibly solid, beautifully written book, and every character, detail, and emotion in it seems uncomfortably real. 

I'm excited to see the movie, but I don't expect it to come even close to the brilliance that's contained in the novel. But we shall see.

Is my egg salad ready now?