You Say You Want a Revolution

Thoreau said most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. He must have foreseen the proliferation of the suburbs.

Richard Yate’s masterful, insightful “Revolutionary Road” is about a couple—Frank and April Wheeler—who desperately want to break out of their quietly desperate lives, to escape the cage of suburbia and fly away to Paris. This leads to a question inspired by the most honest character in the book, a mental patient who asks, Are these the Wheelers on Revolutionary Road or the Revolutionaries on Wheeler Road?

Frank Wheeler says he wants a revolution. April Wheeler says she has a real solution.

In the unreal America of the 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be an ideal couple: smart, sexy, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Maybe they married too young, started a family too early, bought the starter home too quickly, bought the American dream too naively. Maybe Frank’s job is meaningless. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble.

Frank is mired in his well-paying but boring office job and April is 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 Paris where “people really live” and where the Wheelers can develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the demands of consumerism required by capitalist America.

The question asked of us by “Revolutionary Road” is: What do you do when you get what you want and you find out you don’t want it after all? Or perhaps, What happens when you have all your needs and most of your wants met? I’ll tell you. In the comfort and safety and quietness of the “good life” you have time to think, you have the solitude and silence to hear the question rising out of the deep well of your cavernous soul, asking “Is this all there is?”

Then the indescribable, undefinable dull ache inside begins—or begins to be felt.

The Wheelers discover what so many do in life—it doesn’t matter how full your house or bank account is if you’re empty inside.

Derived from Old French and Latin words, suburb literally means “under the city.” Perhaps the first ones were, and though now suburbs are more “away” from than “under” the city, it’s what’s going on “under” the surface, the fissures beneath the facade, the decay behind the idyllic illusion of the “little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky, little boxes, little boxes all the same.”

For a little while is appears that Frank and April are going to be the Revolutionaries on Wheeler Road, but fear and comfort and dishonesty and denial cause them to conform right back to merely being the Wheelers on Revolutionary Road.
You say you want a revolution.

Me, too. Let’s do it.

You tell me that it’s evolution, that you have a real solution.

Me, too. I’m with you.

It’s not by freeing ourselves from suburbia, but by freeing our minds from the prison of conformity to family, religious, and cultural conventions and assumptions. True revolutionary freedom doesn’t come from changing our addresses, but from changing our minds, our hearts, finding real meaning and purpose—not from flying away to Paris, but from letting our spirits soar. If, like the Wheelers, if like Thoreau, we don’t want to go to the grave with the song still in us, then baby don’t wait, just start singing.