Road block

So my plan to read a book a week this year may have hit a rough patch.

Or, you could say, hit a traffic jam on Revolutionary Road. (Revolutionary Road, traffic jam. It’s a pun! Get it? OK, you don’t have to laugh. Especially if it’s a pity laugh, because I just can’t take that today.)

I picked up the novel Revolutionary Road by Robert Yates last week in the bookstore because A) I’d heard of the movie and B) read in some article about newer novels everyone should read and this one was listed. I picked it up because I wanted an entirely different time period/genre from my last book, which had been about Jane Austen and set in a Regency time period. RR (what we’ll dub Revolutionary Road) is set in the 1950s and involves a young couple, Frank and April, who seem happily married . . . or so you think.

Last night, a friend saw the novel lying on the arm of my couch and asked how I was liking it. The best answer is simply, I don’t know. Because I don’t. The inner journalist in me rails against the excessive wordiness and long, endless paragraphs. Don’t take that as me being a simpleton who can only read short sentence constructions. I can, do, and like long purposeful sentences. These seem like information overload and overkill. I’m not asking for Hemingway’s style of writing here, because frankly, I’ve never been able to get through much more than his short stories and the terse, snippy sentences he uses add up to shorty, snippy paragraphs that seem jerky and jolting to me. I can’t see how a narrative adds up among all of the subjects and verbs.

My other complaint about RR is the angst. Oh, geeze, the angst! I understand that many writers see angst as the defining American characteristic or ethos, but these people in this book kill me. Frank is always dwelling on himself, how he feels, what he’s going to say. There’s this pervading feeling of self-loathing and distrust in the American ideals. April, the wife, is cold, frigidly so, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out if she loves or hates her husband. Or if she’s even capable of loving anyone in any kind of meaningful way. I just get tired of these hopeless people talking about their hopeless lives that are centered completely on themselves, who of course they hate.

Yet, I keep reading, hoping my true feelings about the book will rise to the surface. That it will get better. That. something. will. happen. Maybe it will; maybe it won’t. Let’s hope my time on planes and in airports this weekend helps me to get a little further into the book.

As a side note, for all my bluster about being from Missouri and saying I know how to handle cold weather, I really hate today’s weather. A high of 24? What is that? CRAZY! At least, when I was little in MO and it snowed, there was the option of getting bundled up and playing in it. And sometimes, we’d hook up a pallet (as in one of those slatted wooden shipping things) to the 4-wheeler and make a sledding device (when you ain’t got no hills, you get innovative). There was this one time that my mom was riding on the pallet and it fell apart and my brother kept driving because he thought my mom was screaming because she was having fun. I figure that since he’s married now and has a kid, he’s probably figured out the difference between the “fun” yell and the “oh-my-gosh-I-might-die” scream.

That said, have a good day! And stay warm!