Richard Yates confided in a memoir of his literary apprenticeship that The Great Gatsby was the most instructive novel he had ever read; its structure and technique were visible yet unobtrusive….

It was with this same sensation of reading a novel at once wholly believable and conscious of its own artifice that I read Yates's first novel, Revolutionary Road…. [It] remains one of the few novels I know that could be called flawless. The story of a promising middle-class marriage that ends in ruin, Revolutionary Road is a grim, pitiless account of the miseries of suburban life. It depicts with controlled rage the illusions of conventional people who consider themselves bohemian, the defensiveness and snobbery encoded in their every act. Like Fitzgerald, Yates imbues his characters with honorable longings—for an ideal romantic love, a depth of experience, some lasting accomplishment—yet concentrates a remorseless eye on their...