In the New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal revisits Richard Yates‘ Revolutionary Road—a fairly unprovocative work about suburbia today, now that Little Children can be a bestseller (a movie version will come out at the end of the year), but tough to wrestle with in 1961:
Yates isn’t interested in expressing tenderness. His characters are doomed, and he leaves it at that. One of his many rejection letters from the New Yorker complained of his “mean-spirited view of things.” Yates was never published there, while “Precious John,” as Yates called Updike, found ample space.
