Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

If you're anything like me, you need to read a book before you see its made-into-a-movie version. If you don't, you won't read the book. I love seeing a movie after I've read the book, but the other way around? Not so much.

I'm especially glad this was the case with Revolutionary Road. Although I wasn't all that wow-ed by the movie, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which contained so much more detail and meat than the big screen version could handle. Building blocks that, in my opinion, adding so much to the novel, were completely left out of the movie. The characters couldn't quite achieve the depth that they did in the book.

At first, when I finished the book, I wasn't even sure that I liked it. It was kinda depressing and one of those books that, when it ended, you were just kinda left with that feeling of, "huh.. interesting." But when I looked back, it was also a book that I was always excited to pick up and read, and when I wasn't reading, I was looking forward to reading it. And, really, THAT, in my opinion, can be enough to dub something a "good book."

For those who aren't familiar with the book, here's Amazon's review of Revolutionary Road:

April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.