Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road, a novel by Richard Yates, is set to come out as a movie in January. The movie is pairing up Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in their first movie together since Titanic. I'm not a big DiCaprio fan, but I do think he could really pull off the part of Frank Wheeler. I read the book in my early twenties; now I'm reading it again in my late late twenties. I have to admit the book has a lot more resonance with me now that I have a wife, two kids, two dogs, and live in the suburbs. If you've read the book, then you know why. Richard Yates writes so well that when Frank Wheeler is discussing "American life" and "consumerism" I can't help but think of how closely it resembles Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451. Yates is a great cultural critic, which also reminds me of Don DeLillo and how closely Revolutionary Road resembles Americana. DeLillo definitely develops the character of David Bell with more darkness of soul and paints a more disturbing, haunting, and dangerous portrait of America than Yates, but the connection is still there.

I'm also reading the poetry of W.S. Merwin and Joseph Brodsky.

Censorship

It is ironic that my "name" on this blog is Granger, which obviously is an allusion to Fahrenheit 451 and also illustrates my intense love of the book and it's message, and the fact that the high school where I teach has just banned Feed by M.T. Anderson. Both Feed and Fahrenheit 451 are similar, which is why I recommended Feed to our Book Review Committee and why it was originally adopted. Well, it was adopted two years ago, under a different school administration and a different school board...now, um, the inappropriate language (the F-word) is causing it to be banned. I was not the one who was teaching Feed at the time of the controversy. A new English teacher in our department was teaching it and a parent complained that she didn't want her daughter to read the book; the teacher gave the student an alternate book; end of story, right? No, the parent also complained to a school board member, who then complained to our new first year principal, who then decided...to suspend teaching of the book and made the new English teacher personally confiscate each copy of the book from each student. My students were just finishing Fahrenheit 451 and heard about the controversy. One of my students came up to me after class one day and said that it all reminded him of the Coda from Fahrenheit when Bradbury writes about how there is more than one way to burn a book. That says it all. You can't fool students and you should never underestimate them. That school board member and the new principal provided the most relevant text-to-world connection my students could ever encounter with their reading of Fahrenheit 451. Oh, and yeah, since we have so many copies of Feed, we are still allowed to offer the book as "independent reading." The next week, the new English teacher offered the book as independent reading and every single student, except the one whose parent complained (who actually really wanted to read the book), chose to read the book. It's interesting how things work out in the end.