Revolutionary Road: The Art of Dialogue

I seldom come across perfect novels. I've read good novels, even great ones, but there is something about perfection that is different from great novel writing. It's simply the quality of having reached the pinnacle of what a novel is all about: the human experience, unhampered by the conventions of literature.

Richard Yates' novel, Revolutionary Road, is a perfect novel. It doesn't have an action-packed plot, filled with twists and turns. Actually, nothing of note happens until nearly the end of the book. (And then it's a doozy!) The setting is mundane, a suburb in the 1950s. The characters are people who aren't particularly passionate, or driven, or even admirable. But Yates' goal in this book is not to develop characters of intellectual or emotional depth. In fact, it's quite the reverse; His aim is to excoriate post-war suburban life, in all its shallowness, it's "hopeless emptiness," and with all its failures.

According to writers of the era, Richard Yates exemplified the "Age of Anxiety"—the 20th century morass of "world wars, hatred, and collective neurosis"—which he somehow manages to capture without directly addressing any of the themes of the era. Yates was greatly admired by Styron and Vonnegut as the voice of their generation. And then Yates died and was forgotten. None of his books sold more than 12,000 copies during his lifetime.

I can't imagine why. 

Revolutionary Road is brilliant. The prose is so accessible you don't realize you're reading. The descriptions are evocative without descending into self-conscious lyricism. (A fallen stage curtain "that became a dull wall of green velvet, faded and streaked with dust" precisely conveys the dismal failure of a play's performance without using a single word that cries for attention.) And his characters are real; so believable that you'd swear you knew them.

As I was reading Revolutionary Road, I couldn't help asking myself: "How is he doing this?" How did Yates establish his characters so firmly, so realistically? The answer to that question lies in the fact that Yates is a master of, as one reviewer put it, "terrifyingly accurate" dialogue. Yates deftly establishes who his characters are through speech. 

What Yates successfully pulls off in his dialogue is natural-sounding speech, with all its stress patterns, rhythms, and repetitions, but without the tediousness of actual speech. Yates has a finely tuned ear, He individualizes the speech patterns of each of his characters, so you know who they are by how they sound. You hear them so clearly, it feels as if you are eavesdropping. Then he takes it one step further, letting us in on the thought processes of these characters—how they sound to themselves as they weigh what they want to say, or what they don't want to say, and their reflections on how they speak.

Does that sound boring? It isn't. It's tense, and it is frighteningly realistic, because we already know who these characters are. Not only have we met them, we may even have been some of them. 

How many couples have arguments that devolve into "You always do that..." "There you go again..." "You know how you get..."? How many couples descend into deception to cover transgression? How many weave a web of words around what they should be saying to one another, but can't? Speech is everything in this book. (When you get to the last line, that will be made crystal clear. I was left breathless.)

We don't necessarily like Yates' characters in Revolutionary Road, but I think that may have been the point. The way he delves into their inner and outer lives—with such finesse, and such detail—we can't help but identify with them. We can sympathize with them without expending the emotional effort of needing to see them in a positive light, because they are undeniably human.

As writers, it would do us good to read Revolutionary Road. This book is not only an example of how to artfully, yet without any seeming effort, establish characters through dialogue, it serves as an example of how to create transparency through using language that cuts to the heart of description without drawing attention to itself. Despite its unpretentious delivery, or, more likely, because of it, that kind of language packs a wallop. 

Read this book, writers, and then read it again. It contains a lesson worth learning: Don't let your writing get in the way of what you want to say.