revolutionary road

Revolutionary Road is the name of the street where Frank and April Wheeler live in Richard Yates’ novel of the same name.  Of course they do, because Frank and April have a horror of convention -  they maintain an ironic detachment from their suburban home as proof of their authenticity and intellectual superiority.

The problem is, neither has ever had the courage to be truly authentic.  Now they’re stuck in a marriage that’s lost its purpose, in a dead-end job and an affair he doesn’t want (Frank) and in household drudgery and motherhood (April).  Their ironic facade is not fooling anyone, even themselves.

Trying to break out of this spiral towards deathly conformity, April suggests they move to Paris. Frank can write his novel an April will go out to work to support them. They’ll be European, urbane, sophisticated, their real selves and thousands of miles from the dreaded stultifying suburbs.

This plan energises them for a while but Frank begins to realize that he is never going to write the novel because he’s not talented nor brave enough. He is secretly relieved when April announces she’s pregnant. April is adamant that the pregnancy should be terminated, and frank thinks he’s talked her around, until she takes matters into her own hands. It ends tragically.

This was a fantastic book. It’s a well observed and perceptive portrait of a relationship that’s run out of steam, satirical and sympathetic. It is identifiably of its time and place, in the way John Updike’s short stories of the same period are, but the book’s not in the slightest bit dated. There are no superfluous words or characters, which takes real talent from a writer.

The best novels for me these days are ones full of uncomfortable truths and insight, disappointment and bitter realisations. Revolutionary Road has all this without being depressing, morbid, sordid or maudlin. I could read it again and again.

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates
Vintage Classics (1961)

short and sweet

Books I’ve read lately but won’t be reviewing in full (no time or no point)

• Madam Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – enjoyed tremendously, amazing how true to life it remains
• North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell – patchy and a bit overblown
• Boys and Girls Forever – Alison Lurie – about kids literature, too US-centric to be fully enjoyable
• Sucked In – Shane Maloney (re-read) – Murray Whelan is my favourite detective and I hope there’s a sequel to Sucked In describing his adventures in Canberra and the Senate
• Jungfrau – Dymphna Cusack – a bit dated, oh what a tizzle people used to get themselves into about young women having sex and abortions. Come In Spinner and Heatwave in Berlin much better examples of her work

denialism

Michael Specter‘s Denialism promises much via subtitle (How irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet and threatens our lives), cover blurb and hype. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of ‘how’ in the book and certainly no ‘why’.

Specter uses six examples where public debate around science and scientific evidence has become polarised and irrational with (he says) negative consequences.

Vioxx was an anti-inflammatory drug that was withdrawn from the market following concerns about side effected.  Specter uses this example to show how poorly the general public understand risk, and how our evaluation of statistical risk often doesn’t include the risk of not doing something.

Specter then goes through the MMR vaccine case and the anti-vaccination movement that grew out of it. He is especially critical of celebrity campaigners such as Jenny McCarthy and those who give them platforms (like Oprah Winfrey), who appear to make no attempt to understand the body of scientific research around vaccines but instead rely on personal experiences and anecdotes.  He notes how quickly this kind of campaigning can lead to populist politicisation and polarisation of the debate, to the detriment of understanding and trust in evidence.

His third example is GM and organic food.  I found this chapter poorly argued. Specter undermines his case for rational and informed debate by being completely uncritical of the GM food industries’ arguments in favour of their products.  He quotes the Golden Rice example as one of the benefits of GM food, however as Raj Patel points out in Stuffed or Starved, people in south east asia are not deficient in Vitamin A because there is something wrong with rice. They are deficient in vitamin A because they can’t afford to eat anything but rice.

Specter also ignores any engagement with the ethical arguments around organic food and GM food, in favour of treating the debate as one of mere nutritionism.  Given his emphasis on the importance of understanding risk in the Vioxx example and his pleas for rational decision making, it was really disappointing that he incorrectly defined  the precautionary principle as ‘hold[ing] that any risk, no matter how remote, must be given more weight than any possible benefit, no matter how great’ (here is the actual definition) and used this spurious definition to support his argument.