Revolutionary Road

Summary

Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple who see themselves as too intelligent and interesting for the conformist Connecticut suburb they inhabit, hatch an ambitious plan to move the family to Paris and escape the ordinary lives closing in around them, a dream that curdles into recrimination and tragedy. Yates writes with clinical, unsparing precision about the gap between the Wheelers' self image and the compromises they have actually made, exposing the quiet desperation beneath postwar suburban prosperity. The novel is now widely regarded as one of the most devastating portraits of the American suburban dream ever written.