Well, this was a well-appointed little torture chamber of a book! Though it is certainly worthy of its reputation as a forgotten classic. Throughout the first hundred pages I was thinking to myself, "This is so excellent. Why is it not required reading for high school students?" Then a hundred pages later I was like, "Because it's not in our national interest for every high school student in America to commit suicide." Yates is unremitting, and truth be told, if GoodReads would let me, I'd really give this book 4.5 stars, because despite the fact that _Revolutionary Road_ is gorgeous and piercing and painfully apt--at once entirely of its time and in possession of the gravitas required to make it an enduring work of literature--the artifice does peak through at times. Yates is so sadistically relentless with his characters, you can almost hear him chortling maniacally over the next horror--prosaic or otherwise--they will be forced to endure. I guess, in some ways, that's the genius of it--Yates makes the flop of a community theater production, the agony of a wicked hangover, or the low, thrumming anxiety and slow disillusionment of another day spent pretending to work at a meaningless job all seem just as monumentally horrifying as the book's ultimate tragedy. And that takes serious virtuosity.

So, to sum up, no one gets out of this novel alive, least of all the reader. But don't let that put you off, because it's also--like all great literature--true, true, true.