Manliness
Finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.
It is one depressing novel!
Belongs on the same bookshelf as Updike and Cheever-books about suburban America in the 1950s that are written so well, in such an utterly contemporary style, that when you look up from their pages, it’s almost hard to comprehend the times they were describing are now 75 years in the past.
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Revolutionary Road’s plot: April Wheeler decides that the only way out of her dissatisfying suburban life is to ditch everything and run away to Europe. She manages to sell the plan to her highly ambivalent husband Frank, but then two things happen: Frank gets a promotion at work, April gets pregnant. Frank backs out of the Europe plan. April does a DIY abortion and dies.
THUNK.
###
In the 1950s, women had not yet joined the workforce in any great numbers. People drank & smoked an amazing amount. People had children but did not seem to like them very much. Gender roles were rigidly policed. Conformity, vigorously promoted by the popular culture, was comforting-I suppose as a reaction to the massive disruptions of World War II.
Updike and Cheever mock that conformity gently.
Richard Yates beats the shit out of it.
For those of us who came of age in the 1960s-the Age of Aquarius!-the 1950s are an empty stretch of calendar, contemptible, really. For everyone else, though, they’ve become kind of a nostalgia fest-fabulous fashions! Jello molds! Danish modern furniture! Mad Men!
###
Manliness was one of the great preoccupations of the 1950s! You see it in the work of the popular writers of the time, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and it is on full display in Revolutionary Road, where the wandering POV God’s Eye alights again & again on one of the male characters’ struggles to push doubts & ambivalences aside, embrace the manly role somehow, despite the neutering effects of meaningless employment & repetitive, soulless suburban life.
The men live lives they don’t want and in doing so push equally restrictive gender roles on to the women in their orbits who must be either cheerful, robotic homemakers or attractive sex objects. The Second Sex was first translated from the French in 1953, but The Feminine Mystique would not be published until 1963. Second-wave feminism was still a long ways off.
###
Richard Yates may disdain suburban life, but he has immense sympathy for the struggle of the men trapped in it.
He has no similar sympathy, though, for the women.
Revolutionary Road’s April is an almost irredeemably unpleasant character. If the term had existed then, she would have been labeled “borderline personality.”
It’s an old, old story. Even when men behave abominably, it’s the women somehow that are forcing them to. Yates could easily have written a novel that transpired in exactly the same way without making April so dislikeable.
###
Anyway, manliness was the theme of the day, yesterday.
Over a really bad breakfast at the Cup & Saucer café, BB & I hashed out election results.
My latest theory: Trump’s populism is not only nostalgia for Making America Great Again through jobs and rallies, it also seeks to return to an era of gender role certainty.
I have no way of proving this, but I am absolutely certain that the whole trans issue played as pivotal a role in Trump’s reelection as the economy or immigration. Voters don’t want to have to think about pronouns. Voters don’t want Erika nee Erik giving their little Olivia a concussion on the volleyball court. Since the Left has been so rabid about policing any expressions of discomfort with the trans phenomenon-I call it a phenomenon because even though I totally believe that gender dysmorphia is real, I also believe that something else is responsible for the escalating numbers of people purporting to experience it at the present historical juncture-people are left to express their dissatisfaction in other ways.
Voting is a secret ballot: You can’t get cancelled for it.
It is one depressing novel!
Belongs on the same bookshelf as Updike and Cheever-books about suburban America in the 1950s that are written so well, in such an utterly contemporary style, that when you look up from their pages, it’s almost hard to comprehend the times they were describing are now 75 years in the past.
###
Revolutionary Road’s plot: April Wheeler decides that the only way out of her dissatisfying suburban life is to ditch everything and run away to Europe. She manages to sell the plan to her highly ambivalent husband Frank, but then two things happen: Frank gets a promotion at work, April gets pregnant. Frank backs out of the Europe plan. April does a DIY abortion and dies.
THUNK.
###
In the 1950s, women had not yet joined the workforce in any great numbers. People drank & smoked an amazing amount. People had children but did not seem to like them very much. Gender roles were rigidly policed. Conformity, vigorously promoted by the popular culture, was comforting-I suppose as a reaction to the massive disruptions of World War II.
Updike and Cheever mock that conformity gently.
Richard Yates beats the shit out of it.
For those of us who came of age in the 1960s-the Age of Aquarius!-the 1950s are an empty stretch of calendar, contemptible, really. For everyone else, though, they’ve become kind of a nostalgia fest-fabulous fashions! Jello molds! Danish modern furniture! Mad Men!
###
Manliness was one of the great preoccupations of the 1950s! You see it in the work of the popular writers of the time, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and it is on full display in Revolutionary Road, where the wandering POV God’s Eye alights again & again on one of the male characters’ struggles to push doubts & ambivalences aside, embrace the manly role somehow, despite the neutering effects of meaningless employment & repetitive, soulless suburban life.
The men live lives they don’t want and in doing so push equally restrictive gender roles on to the women in their orbits who must be either cheerful, robotic homemakers or attractive sex objects. The Second Sex was first translated from the French in 1953, but The Feminine Mystique would not be published until 1963. Second-wave feminism was still a long ways off.
###
Richard Yates may disdain suburban life, but he has immense sympathy for the struggle of the men trapped in it.
He has no similar sympathy, though, for the women.
Revolutionary Road’s April is an almost irredeemably unpleasant character. If the term had existed then, she would have been labeled “borderline personality.”
It’s an old, old story. Even when men behave abominably, it’s the women somehow that are forcing them to. Yates could easily have written a novel that transpired in exactly the same way without making April so dislikeable.
###
Anyway, manliness was the theme of the day, yesterday.
Over a really bad breakfast at the Cup & Saucer café, BB & I hashed out election results.
My latest theory: Trump’s populism is not only nostalgia for Making America Great Again through jobs and rallies, it also seeks to return to an era of gender role certainty.
I have no way of proving this, but I am absolutely certain that the whole trans issue played as pivotal a role in Trump’s reelection as the economy or immigration. Voters don’t want to have to think about pronouns. Voters don’t want Erika nee Erik giving their little Olivia a concussion on the volleyball court. Since the Left has been so rabid about policing any expressions of discomfort with the trans phenomenon-I call it a phenomenon because even though I totally believe that gender dysmorphia is real, I also believe that something else is responsible for the escalating numbers of people purporting to experience it at the present historical juncture-people are left to express their dissatisfaction in other ways.
Voting is a secret ballot: You can’t get cancelled for it.