“Well, but I mean really congenial people,” she said. “Our kind of people. Oh, I was very fond of the Wheelers, but they always were a bit—a bit whimsical, for my taste. A bit neurotic. I may not have stressed it, but they were often very trying people to deal with, in many ways. Actually, the main reason the little house has been so hard to sell is that they let it depreciate so dreadfully. Warped window frames, wet cellar, crayon marks on the walls, filthy smudges around all the doorknobs and fixtures—really careless, destructive things. And that awful stone path going halfway down the front lawn and ending in a mud puddle—can you imagine anyone defacing a property like that? It’s going to cost Mr. Brace a small fortune to get it cleared away and replanted. No, but it was more than that. The kind of thing I mean goes deeper than that.”
She paused to press the excess varnish from her brush against the side of the can, frowning, working her lips in an effort to find words for the kind of thing she meant.
“It’s just that they were a rather strange young couple. Irresponsible. The guarded way they’d look at you; the way they’d talk to you; unwholesome, sort of. Oh, and another thing. Do you know what I came across in the cellar? All dead and dried out? I came across an enormous box of sedum plantings that I must have spent an entire day collecting for them last spring. I remember very carefully selecting the best shoots and very tenderly packing them in just the right kind of soil—that’s the kind of thing I mean, you see. Wouldn’t you think that when someone goes to a certain amount of trouble to give you a perfectly good plant, a living, growing thing, wouldn’t you think the very least you’d do would be to—”
But from there on Howard Givings heard only a welcome, thunderous sea of silence. He had turned off his hearing aid.
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Richard Yates
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade, and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992.
ALSO BY RICHARD YATES
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
A Special Providence
Disturbing the Peace
The Easter Parade
A Good School
Liars in Love
Young Hearts Crying
Cold Spring Harbor
Acclaim for Richard Yates’s
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
“Every phrase reflects to the highest degree integrity and stylistic mastery. To read Revolutionary Road is to have forced upon us a fresh sense of our critical modern shortcomings: failures of work, education, community, family, marriage…and plain nerve.”
—The New Republic
“Richard Yates is a writer of commanding gifts. His prose is urbane yet sensitive, with passion and irony held deftly in balance. And he provides unexpected pleasures in a flood of freshly minted phrases and in the thrust of sudden insight, precise notation of feeling, and mordant unsentimental perceptions.”
—Saturday Review
“A powerful treatment of a characteristically American theme, which might be labeled ‘trapped.’…A highly impressive performance. It is written with perception, force and awareness of complexity and ambiguity, and it tells a moving and absorbing story.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
THIRD VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2008
Copyright © 1961, copyright renewed 1989 by Richard Yates
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Little, Brown & Co., Boston, Massachusetts, in 1961.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yates, Richard, 1926–1992.
Revolutionary road / Richard Yates.—Vintage Contemporaries ed.
p. cm.
1. Married people—Connecticut—Fiction. 2. Suburban life—Connecticut—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3575.A83 R4 2000
813'54—dc21 99-055503
Author photograph © 1989 by Jill Krementz
www.vintagebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-45627-4
v3.0
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
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