On Not Being Special

Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road

An enduring and misplaced belief in one’s own fundamental specialness is sometimes said to be a particularly millennial character flaw — the generation of participation trophies and self esteem and all that. And, as a millennial myself (albeit an “old” one by current definitions) I have to admit that my age-and-socioeconomic-type peers often aren’t doing themselves any favors. When the “gifted kid burnout” tweets and bingo cards were going around a few years ago, I had to cringe. I was told I was smart as a child and yet have grown up mediocre; the disappointment is debilitating the complaint goes. Some enjoy this version: I was told I was smart as a child and therefore have grown up mediocre; if less had been expected of me I would have achieved more. But despite lamenting the ill-effects of being over-praised as a child, these people, in general, still want someone to tell them they’re smart. So do I! So do most people!

And now let’s set aside tiresome generational politics, because it seems to be an entirely human thing, at least with humans as far I understand them: everyone wants to believe, in fact already believes in their heart, that they’re special. This isn’t particular to any one generation. I read the 1930’s “success literature” classic How to Win Friends and Influence People at an impressionable age, and the main thing it impressed upon me was that most everyone, all the way up and down the societal ladder, believes that no matter how ordinary they seem to others, on the inside they’re capable of greatness.

And at the same time, almost by definition, most everyone is average in most ways. People usually do the things that are typical for their “type” — if you know where someone lives, their age and socioeconomic status and demographics and job title, you can probably make a pretty good guess about what their politics will be and how they dress and even what kind of food and tv shows they like. You won’t be right all the time, but you’ll be right often enough.

And the people who don’t do what everyone else does? They pay a price. Society will make life more difficult for them, sometimes out of malice, but most often from indifference.

On to Revolutionary Road.

If as a child you were told you were smart and as a youth were told you were interesting, if you ever had serious aspirations to write a novel or live abroad or become a star, if you disdained the idea of starting a family in the suburbs, if you sneered at anything “too mainstream”, “too corporate” or “too bourgeois”, if you told yourself you’d only marry someone truly exceptional, if despite all this you have a boring job and and ugly furniture and friends who get on your nerves, along with a nagging melancholy feeling that this isn’t where you were supposed to end up, you’re the kind of person Richard Yates was thinking about when he wrote Revolutionary Road. His 1961 novel has more empathy for this kind of person than sneering op-eds about “special snowflakes”, but it’s also much crueler than those op-eds could ever be.

(If you’re not this kind of person, you’re probably thinking ugh, get over yourself. Which, to be honest, might be what Yates would say too.)

It chronicles a summer in the lives of Frank and April Wheeler, who absolutely are these kind of people. In flashbacks we see them as hopeful youths: Frank is handsome and reads Jean-Paul Sartre, and April’s a sharp-witted actress. Yates is careful, however, to show us that they weren’t necessarily on the path to greatness. When we see what Frank’s ideas about his own talents actually consist of, the heavy irony of the narration demonstrates that they’re pretty flimsy:

His marks at school were seldom better than average, but there was nothing average about his performance in the beery, all-night talks that had begun to form around him — talks that would often end in a general murmur of agreement, accompanied by a significant tapping of temples, that old Wheeler really had it. All he would ever need, it was said, was the time and the freedom to find himself. Various ultimate careers were predicted for him, the consensus being that his work would lie somewhere “in the humanities” if not precisely in the arts — it would, at any rate, be something that called for a long and steadfast dedication — and that it would involve his early and permanent withdrawal to Europe, which he often described as the only part of the world worth living in. And Frank himself, walking the streets at daybreak after some of those talks, or lying and thinking on Bethune Street on nights when he had use of the place but had no girl to use it with, hardly ever entertained a doubt of his own exceptional merit. Weren’t the biographies of all great men filled with this same kind of youthful groping, this same kind of rebellion against their fathers and their fathers’ ways? He could even be grateful in a sense that he had no particular area of interest: in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

April, although she’s something of an Emma Bovary, is much more realistic about her own limitations. She recognizes that the acting thing was only really ever something to do, that she could probably never have made a serious career of it, and is counting instead on embodying that romantic, subservient feminine ideal: placing herself in service to a great man.

But necessity gets in the way, namely pregnancy and its economic implications. The Wheelers move to the suburbs and Frank takes a mind-deadening job at Knox Business Machines. They console themselves by thinking they’re not really suburbanites, and they haven’t really conformed. To adapt a quip from Steinbeck about the poor, they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed sophisticates.

They commiserate with their neighbors, the Campbells:

The cancerous growth of Senator McCarthy had poisoned the United States, and with the pouring of second or third drinks they could begin to see themselves as members of an embattled, dwindling intellectual underground. Clippings from the Observer or the Manchester Guardian would be produced and read aloud, to slow and respectful nods. Frank might talk wistfully of Europe — “God, I wish we’d taken off and gone there when we had the chance” — and this might lead to a quick general lust for expatriation: “Let’s all go!” (Once it went as far as a practical discussion of how much they’d need for boat fare and rent and schools, until Shep, after a sobering round of coffee, explained what he’d read about the difficulty of getting jobs in foreign countries).

And even after politics had palled there had still been the elusive but endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, or The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today. “Oh Jesus,” Shep might begin, “you know this character next door to us? Donaldson? The one that’s always out fooling with his power mower and talking about the rat race and the soft sell? Well, listen: did I tell you what he said about his barbecue pit?” And there would follow an anecdote of extreme suburban smugness that left them weak with laughter.

“Oh, I don’t believe it,” April would insist. Do they really talk that way?”

They are able to maintain this fiction for a while, until April suffers a sickening humiliation as the lead actress in a disastrous community theatre production of The Petrified Forest. Galvanized by her mortification, she does something extremely dangerous: she calls Frank’s bluff. She proposes that they actually do the things they always say they want to do.

All the other humiliations that follow, which unfold with a feeling of clockwork inevitability the way a tragedy should, I will leave to the reader. I will say that it takes the bleakest possible perspective on the possibility of seriously changing one’s life, once adult responsibilities have set in.

Yates was no feminist (rather the opposite), but my impression of the novel is that he’s much kinder to April than to Frank. Yates lingers on Frank’s passivity, his susceptibility to flattery, his longing to feel like a man without having to do anything especially manly. But April is prepared to put up or shut up, as it were. And ultimately it’s her rage at her situation — involuntary housewifery with a husband who’s a lesser man than she thought — that forms the engine of the novel. My modern eyes see her as embodying the fears of many an ambitious woman: having personal dreams derailed by children, and a husband who wants you to be happy in the abstract but won’t do anything to bring it about. And to my mind he’s accurate on one point: there are men who will resent you for having their children — “tying them down” — and simultaneously resent you if you won’t have their children.

Creeping in at the edges is the sinister presence of what I’ll call Therapy Culture. It must be said that many people benefit enormously from therapy and mental health treatment is frequently life-saving, but I often wonder if the language and ideals springing up around it — the buzzwords of boundaries and needs and validation and vulnerability — let’s not even get started on emotional labor — could use a lot more interrogation than they’re currently getting. That’s a topic for another newsletter, but I’ll note that Frank, in trying to address his wife’s unhappiness and his own, takes a number of pages directly from the modern self-care playbook. He finds enormous comfort in detachment, seeing her problems as separate from his own, and her emotions as beyond his control. In one scene, he sweetly suggests she speak to a therapist, and diagnoses her (in effect) with Childhood Emotional Neglect. Take this exchange:

“Look,” he was saying, “this may sound as if I think there is something ‘awful’ the matter with you; the fact is I don’t. I do think, though, that there’s one or two aspects to this thing we haven’t really touched on yet, and I think we ought to. For instance, I wonder if your real motives here are quite as simple as you think. I mean isn’t it possible there are forces at work here that you’re not entirely aware of? That you’re not recognizing?”

She didn’t answer, and in the darkness he could only guess at whether she was listening or not. He took a deep breath. “I mean things that have nothing to do with Europe,” he said, “or with me. I mean things within yourself, things that have their origin in your own childhood—your own upbringing and so on. Emotional things.”

There was a long silence before she said, in a pointedly neutral tone: “You mean I’m emotionally disturbed.”

“I didn’t say that!” But in the next hour, as his voice went on and on, he managed to say it several times in several different ways. Wasn’t it likely, after all, that a girl who’d known nothing but parental rejection from the time of her birth might develop an abiding reluctance to bear children?

“I mean it’s always been a wonder to me that you could survive a childhood like that, let alone come out of it without any damage to your — you know, your ego and everything.”

In internet therapy parlance we would call what Frank is doing deflection and minimizing, but at the same time I’m absolutely certain that therapists everywhere today are telling their clients pretty much the same thing as he tells April above. Now we’re quick to recommend therapy and medicalized mental health treatment for pretty much every form of distress (and I’ll reiterate that it does help people and save lives), but it’s easy to forget that in the past, many progressives saw the mental health establishment as a force for oppression and conformity (which it often was!). One area where Yates veers perilously close to cliché is in the introduction of a Truth-Speaking Madman, a character with schizophrenia depicted as the ultimate non-conformist, the only person able to speak frankly about the Wheelers and their world.

I used to be pretty certain that one of the defining elements of maturity was relinquishing the idea of one’s own specialness. Parenting advice has even moved away from self esteem — you’re supposed to praise your children now for working hard, not for innate qualities like intelligence. But the ways that people limit and lie to themselves are endless, and I’m also starting to think that you need to maintain at least some belief in your own specialness if you want your life to take on a different shape from the path that’s laid out for you. Yates seems to be saying, if you think you’re special you’re probably lying to yourself, and if you’re truly special you’re probably going to suffer for it. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. But I can’t sign on entirely to his bleak worldview. After all, most gifted kids turn out perfectly fine.