Revolutionary Road

For the past couple of days, I have been reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I sort of came to it by chance: it was mentioned in the Nick Hornby columns and I was ordering something from Amazon and needed an extra thing to qualify for the free delivery (only starts from 25 pounds to the Netherlands), and then I thought: why not? I'd seen the film, so I already knew the story, and 92 5-star Amazon reviews should be enough, right?
Definitely right. In fact, I've started to slow down on my reading so I will be able to read this novel for longer. The depth of character, the smallness of their world and the experience of reading about their lives and seeing how very wrong they are, how very annoying and stupid and short-sighted, but still bewitching in their own way, is fascinating. Since I've seen the film I know how it's going to end, but still, the plot is not the most important thing in this novel, it's the way things are being said, the way the characters develop. That is of course part of what makes something a classic, but it has been a long long time (probably since reading Saturday*), that I've had this experience in a novel.
Also, I've been spending several minutes before falling asleep at night pondering how on earth this could be someone's debut novel. I mean, if this is the first thing he ever published, then I can't really wrap my mind around what he will have written after that. I must definitely read more by this author.
Also, reading this novel has made me put some of the other things I've read into new perspective. The scenes from The Hours that are set in the fifties somehow make more sense after reading this. Same is true for On the Road. It is so interesting to see the widely divergent ways that the fifties were experienced in the US, and it makes me wonder which (if any) of the novels that are written today will make the 50-year mark, shaping the ideas of future people about the time we're living in now.


* I never do these little asterisk thingies but this time what I'm going to say is so widely different from the rest that I can't really help it: a fellow student of English wrote his MA dissertation on post-9/11 literature, and he included Saturday in the lot. This made me very confused at first, because in my mind, the novel is about almost everything but 9/11. But then I talked about it with him, and he explained some points, and now I feel like there is this whole layer to my favourite novel that I'd never noticed or knew about before, and I will definitely have to re-read Saturday some time really soon, but first I have to come to terms with the fact that there is still more to be found in something I've already read and loved 5 times over. Literature is hard work, sometimes.