REVOLUTIONARY RUT

The Preachy Misery of the Enlightened Class

In Richard Yates’ 1962 novel, Revolutionary Road, a young, educated east-coast couple, Frank and April Wheeler, living in a ho-hum starter home somewhere in the New York City suburbs relaxes over drinks one evening with another such couple, the Campbells. Dampening their boozy conversation is April’s recent so-so lead performance in a miserable amateur theater production – a failed attempt to bring Bohemian flair to her and her inner circle’s tedious lives. The couples, pressed for things to say, talk politics, bemoaning the “reactionary” local schoolboard as Frank drifts off and remembers better evenings when they also talked politics, but with more zeal. He recalls spirited discussions of “the cancerous growth of Senator McCarthy” and how “after politics had palled there had still been the elusive but endlessly absorbing topics of Conformity, or The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today.”

It's all quite depressing, like the novel itself, a portrait of alcoholic self-delusion and emotional emptiness among the grasping, striving, forward-thinking, white American commuting class. It’s a novel the Wheeler’s themselves might read, that is, and for much the same elevating reasons that April acted in the sad play and that she and her circle clip political articles from the Manchester Guardian. Theirs is a culturally self-conscious milieu, roughly the one depicted in The Great Gatsby, everything ever written by JD Salinger, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee, and ninety per-cent of the work of the three Johns: O’Hara, Cheever, and Updike. It’s a milieu so pitilessly, exhaustively, and unendingly fictionalized and dramatized (even to this day; see Jonathan Franzen) that one is amazed it can still bear to exist, let alone take its own existence seriously, let alone expect that all America – and all the world, in fact -- should take it as seriously as it takes itself.

If the Wheelers were alive today — and they very much are, still deploring right-wing school boards, still quoting from The Guardian, still cultivating their inner-lives while grubbing for corporate paychecks in the city – one can easily picture the signs stuck in their lawn and the icons on their social media. Nothing material has changed, and very little has changed rhetorically. In the same way the Wheelers tut-tut about the suburbs while remaining ensconced behind their hedges, the class that most keenly despises its own privilege still indulges its greatest privilege of all: forcing us to hearken to what it thinks. It’s almost as though the effect of endless self-criticism is boundless self-satisfaction and inertia. But how can this be? It violates cultural law! Aren’t students taught in the very schools and colleges which grant this thoughtful class credentials – credentials which in its stories about itself usually prove to be tragically unfulfilling – that serious art fosters critical self-knowledge and critical self-knowledge fosters change?

Folks, we have a paradox on our hands, and not just any old paradox. A paradox concerning a social class which deeply believes that its learning and sensitivity have equipped it to handle paradox at levels that its supposed inferiors can’t comprehend. Democracy can be installed abroad by troops. It’s fine to fly private jets across an ocean so long as they land at a conference on climate change. The patriarchy is best dismantled by male politicians from dynastic families. To lesser minds, these are instances of hypocrisy, but to the class that has managed the rare feat of arrogantly wielding its own influence to solve the great problems wrought by its past influence, hypocrisy, practiced correctly, by the right people, is the dialectical motor of true progress. To eager readers of New Yorker fiction about the superficial, frigid lives of readers of the New Yorker, it takes a thief to catch a thief, much as it takes opaque intelligence agencies to guarantee an open society. And huge corporations to rein in capitalism. And on and on and on and on. Like a vintage Carly Simon album abhorring the leisure-class depressives whose children helped turn her records into hits.

“Liberal guilt,” conservatives used to call this, and some of the proudest liberals of the era plead guilty-as-charged, proving the accusation at the same time they paradoxically, dialectically, and (to plain-thinking types) maddeningly transcended it. It has since become their favorite magic trick, placing signs of welcome to minorities in front of houses few minorities can afford to purchase but often visit – as gardeners and maids. These homeowners clearly wish it weren’t this way, of course, and one hears they are working to correct things by pressuring their vastly wealthy colleges to admit the children of their servants so they too can someday trade derivatives, move to Scarsdale, and quietly die inside.

Though maybe the new guard won’t suffer like the old guard. Maybe the reason the Wheelers and their ilk were so unhappy in their leafy enclaves was that they suspected in their progressive souls that others deserved the good luck they found so numbing. Maybe their anxious sorrows were those of people doomed to maintain the roofs and yards and driveways that history, slowly tracing its arc of justice, would eventually award to mortgage-holders (or renters from Blackrock-like financial giants) more capable of feeling joy and gratitude.

It’s certainly a theory. But Yates’ novel and countless others like it don’t support it in the least. In Revolutionary Road, the dolor of the enlightened, liberal couple – the dolor the Wheeler’s real-life peers so love to savor in stories about their class – stems from a rather simple source, one that still abounds today: fantastical entitled narcissism. The Wheelers believe they are interesting people, or potentially interesting people, and that their town, their country, and the whole system have stunted their souls and starved their intellects. Yates, their creator, suggests this isn’t so – the Wheelers are living exactly as they’ve chosen, in America’s dreamy, steady-income shallows – but his characters know this only dimly. Mostly, they just hate themselves. And in this they resemble their counterparts today. Perhaps the only class in human history that loathes itself on principle while pushing its principles on everyone else.