Last weekend I read an article in the Chronicle about the new Sam Mendes movie, Revolutionary Road. I read and enjoyed the book many years ago. It sounds like Mendes followed the book as closely as possible, so maybe I can go see it without risking a replay of my reaction to There Will Be Blood. What I liked about the article was the insight on the author Richard Yates and the changing culture around reading.
Even as a National Book Award finalist in 1962, with "Revolutionary Road," Yates had the misfortune of going up against Joseph Heller ("Catch-22"), J.D. Salinger ("Franny and Zooey") and the eventual winner, Walker Percy ("The Moviegoer"). Critics loved "Revolutionary Road"; writers canonized it.I'm not sure impressing your neighbors on the local cocktail party circuit even exists any more. Certainly not in our neighborhood. Still, you're a lot better off trying to break the ice in a conversation by talking about American Idol than you are by talking about what you've read lately.
The book centers on a time when men defined themselves not only by their salary but also by the books they read and the ideas they burnished. The National Endowment for the Arts recently came out with a study that showed that after college, most men will not read another literary novel before they die.
Was this Yates' largest obstacle, that a book examining the frailties of the American man begged for a male audience, one that has long since disappeared? The notion of striving for some sort of intellectual weight "with which to impress your neighbors is largely gone," Mendes says.
2 comments:
No independent bookstores in Naples. The closest I ever saw was a "used books" with some swapping going on. The guy who ran that store knew everything on his shelves, and there were a lot of books there. Out of business long ago, though.
Today, Barnes and Noble is heaven compared to Books A Million. I usually use the nearest public library, where I can generally order what I want and get good service.
I recently abandoned the Supreme Court book because I just got fed up with reading about Roe v Wade. This has never seemed to me like the life-and-death issue accorded to it by both sides, and certainly a poor test to decide who gets appointed to the Supreme Court. Guess I'm on the liberal side there, along with flag burning and gay marriage.
Don't push me too far, though!
Wow!!!
Yes, there was a lot of Roe v Wade in the book. You hear about from the perspective of confirmation hearings and so on, but it was pretty depressing to get the inside view of just how much the religious right has coopted the decisionmaking process on judicial choices.
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