Done

Well! And hello, everyone (??). Here we are. The time is almost ripe for picking out a new book, as I've finished Revolutionary Road. There was a bout of reading yesterday, and I trotted through the last hundred pages or so, very much riveted. Let's do a full (ish) review, shall we?

The first thing I have to say, is that I can't believe this book isn't recognized as more of a classic, that Richard Yates isn't required reading in school, and that this novel flies so much under the radar. It is absolutely superb. Prose-wise, it is one of the best novels I've ever read. Written in 1961 about the claustrophobic emptiness of suburban life in the early '50s, Revolutionary Road still manages to have a modern presence and urgency in it, more than fourty years after it's publication. If I had read it without knowing when it was written, and was pushed to guess, I'd say sometime in the mid-2000's.

It has remarkable subtlety, and precision in all it's narrative. Very vivid, very imaginable, and recollects reality in an almost painfully relatable way. I love this quote from the back flap, from The Boston Globe, commenting on Richard Yates: "Soft-spoken in his prose and terrifyingly accurate in his dialogue, Yates renders his characters with such authenticity that you hardly realize what he's done."

And more than that, in my opinion, he renders an entire world so recognizable as one we know, one we're equally as able as the characters to become entangled in, that 'terrifying', 'troubling', and 'masterpiece' are as close to the perfect description of Revolutionary Road as I can get.

-

Next on the list may be something in the lighter-hearted genre, or, alternately, something a bit more action-packed. Possibly The Taking by Dean Koontz. We shall see, I'll let you know when I decide:D

-s5g


P.S. If so inclined, I urge you to read some of the review for RR on Amazon (they do it much better justice than my quick little worship-fest). But beware of spoilers.