Recommendations
Books Like Revolutionary Road
What to read after Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road (1961) is one of the most unsparing novels about American suburban life — Frank and April Wheeler's mutual contempt for the life they have chosen and the price of that contempt. If you were drawn to its portrait of self-deception as a form of slow suicide, its examination of what postwar prosperity actually cost, and its total refusal of sentiment, these novels offer the same seriousness.
- 1Buy
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The predecessor to Revolutionary Road — where Fitzgerald shows American aspiration as tragic from the outside, Yates shows it from inside the marriage; both novels diagnose the same self-deception about what American life is supposed to deliver
- 2Buy
The Easter Parade
by Richard Yates
Yates's second major novel — two sisters in New York from the 1930s through the 1970s, neither of whom manages to find the life she imagined; the most direct companion to Revolutionary Road in Yates's work, equally unsparing
- 3Buy
The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Three women across different decades connected by Virginia Woolf — the same examination as Revolutionary Road of what women's lives cost when they are shaped entirely by expectations they did not choose, but told with more formal invention and more sympathy
- 4Buy
Blue Jasmine / The Ice Storm
by Rick Moody
Two families in 1970s Connecticut suburbs during Thanksgiving weekend — the same Connecticut suburb as Revolutionary Road, the same portrait of the marriage rot beneath the American surface, in a more darkly comedic register
- 5Buy
American Beauty
by Alan Ball
Lester Burnham, dissatisfied in his Connecticut suburb — the film version of the same critique Yates makes; Yates was rediscovered partly because Revolutionary Road was compared to American Beauty after the film came out in 1999 (two years before Yates was properly canonized)
- 6Buy
Desperate Housewives
by Richard Russo
The fictional suburb of Mohegan Falls, New York and the men who live in it — Russo examines the same suburban trap from a more compassionate angle; Empire Falls (2001) won the Pulitzer Prize
- 7Buy
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
The Lambert family scattered across America, their parents aging in St. Jude, trying to organize one last Christmas — the 2001 National Book Award winner; the same savage examination of middle-class American life and its comforting self-deceptions, updated to the Clinton era
- 8Buy
Cheever: The Journals
by John Cheever
John Cheever is the writer most closely associated with Yates as a chronicler of suburban desperation — his Wapshot novels and story collections (especially The Swimmer) examine the same Connecticut and Long Island suburbs; his journals reveal the self-loathing beneath the surface
More Revolutionary Road Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.