Revolutionary Road: Delusions of Exceptionalism

Most people know Revolutionary Road as a wonderfully sad 2008 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. But RR was a Richard Yates 1962 book before that, one that was wildly popular with critics and other literary authors, but not with the wider public. It’s a beautifully written book with the theme of “hopeless emptiness,” precisely how the main characters, Frank (Leo) and April (Kate) Wheeler, refer to their lives in 1955 Connecticut suburbia.

Frank and April are an attractive¹ thirty year old couple with two kids. Frank commutes to the city to work at a classic middle management, “bullshit” job in “sales promotion,” a job he consistently disparages. April tends to the house and the kids. The core of their marriage is built around their joint and certain belief that they’re “exceptional” and don’t belong where they are, among people who are inferior to them in taste and intellect. Rather, they belong in Europe doing something “important” and “artistic.” (Cue a dozen hapless expatriate characters eviscerated in books by Hemmingway and Fitzgerald for trying to “find themselves abroad.”)

This shared belief between Frank and April is really a conspiracy theory, because they have no evidence for their exceptionalism. It’s simply what they told each other when they first met, and they’ve clung so tightly to the idea of their exceptionalism for a decade of marriage that it’s become their two person cult. Neither one of them has dared to dispute or deviate from a single tenet of the cult lest the whole infrastructure of their belief system and their lives come tumbling down.

The book and movie begin with the first serious crack in the foundation of the cult. April, once an aspiring actress, stars in a community theatre production of “the Petrified Forest,” and she and the production are inarguably awful.² From there, disaster and destruction follow their insidious and inevitable path.

I just finished re-reading RR and, emotionally, it’s a tough read. The skillful, flawless, plain prose offers no respite for the reader to hide, no place to avert the mind’s eye. The pain is relentless, and I’m convinced that the author Richard Yates³ must have had a deep personal well of despair to have written so well about personal pain.

I guess I’m not surprised the book didn’t catch on so quickly.

Reading Revolutionary Road made me think of how potentially dangerous the idea of exceptionalism can be. And while exceptionalism is one of those large words that can cover a great deal of intellectual waterfront, I’m using it here to mean an exaggerated belief that you are better than you really are.

I use the qualifying word exaggerated, because modest exceptionalism can be a necessary lubricant to the functioning of most relationships, whether a marriage (or any romantic relationship), a family, or a friendship.

For example, I suspect that most long lasting couples develop their own intimate patois of shorthand phrases and repeated stories they come to believe are not only unique but also superior to that of other couples, whose own intimacies are rarely if ever revealed to outsiders. This is harmless (although willfully ignorant) exceptionalism as it helps to bind a couple together.  

As for friends, we must think that our friends are exceptionally congenial for us or else why would we look forward to being with them? Otherwise, any random person might suffice for company.

Finally, as to families, I’ll quote from the opening of my favorite John Cheever story (if only to reveal the “exceptional” breadth of my knowledge of suburban angst literature) :

“….and while we are not a distinguished family, we enjoy the illusion, when we are together, that [we] are unique.”

In this Cheever story, “Goodbye My Brother,” it’s this claim of uniqueness that becomes the battlefield over which three of the siblings and their mother fight against the fourth sibling who refuses to accept the claim.⁴

But Frank and April Wheeler suffered from exaggerated exceptionalism. And theirs is an object lesson that when we believe that we are markedly superior to our circumstances and to the people around us, unhappiness is sure to follow. When I was 26, I believed that my intellectual talents were being limited and wasted in finance among people whose interests were narrowly confined to the crass pursuit of money. So I determined that I should become a history professor. Our little family–––my wife and I and our six month old daughter–––spent the summer in Paris⁵ and that fall I started graduate school.

I was miserable!

My naïve expectations of the academic life were quickly shattered. Instead of kindred and elevated souls, I was surrounded by students and professors who were, if anything, more interested in the advancement of their careers than the people in the milieu I’d left behind. I told myself at the time that five years of business had spoiled me for academia. The truth was and is that I’ve never felt completely comfortable in either sphere. I’ve always had an internal tug of war between finance and the intellectual life. And perhaps that’s been a blessing in that I’ve never felt myself exaggeratedly exceptional in either.

I quit graduate school after a semester, having received a lifeline back into finance.

In time, I noted that some parents habitually exaggerate the exceptional talents of their children, these praise-crazy parents of course being extraordinarily annoying. I make a distinction, however, between two categories of claimed exceptionalism for children. The annoying category is resume talents (to borrow from David Brooks) like grades and test scores, and incredible extracurricular activities. The second category, which I never find off-putting, revolves around kindness.

Finally, I can’t address the harm of exaggerated exceptionalism without touching upon American Exceptionalism. I remember being among the many who were offended when Barack Obama said that every country was exceptional in the eyes of their own countrymen. Now, I think that’s true. And while I believe that America is exceptional in many aspects, not all of them are positive.

My encounters with people who believe “my country right or wrong,” call to mind the worst of the braggart parents I’ve encountered over the years. The only thing worse in politics are the people who believe America is exceptionally evil and who blame America for all the worlds’ ills

And perhaps the internal political fight that’s raging now is to see whether our country can rid itself of the lie that America is and has always been either uniformly righteous or uniformly evil.

We need to overcome these opposing views so we don’t become like Frank and April Wheeler, smashed to spiritual bits by the clash of ignorant cults of exaggerated exceptionalism.

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1. Excellently cast based on the book’s descriptions. Although it’s impossible to make either actor look unattractive as the book occasionally calls for.

2. Yates takes a “pitiless gaze” on April’s on-stage meltdown. No comic relief. This is not “Waiting for Guffman”

3. Seinfeld trivia: Larry David dated Richard Yates’ daughter who may have been the inspiration for the Julia Louis-Dreyfuss character, Elaine Benes.

4. The stories of Cheever cover more or less the same suburban angst ground as RR, but in Cheever, there’s always an element of hope and humor and cheerfulness, even when his characters are fatally flailing.

5. Ok, so we did a little of our own “finding ourselves abroad.”