Although a 1961 novel about a young couple that departs Manhattan for the Connecticut suburbs -- reminding one on its face, maybe, of numerous short stories of John Cheever (and told with the same keen sense observation) and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (with which it shares an acerbic humor) -- Revolutionary Road has surprising contemporary resonance. Many readers will find they are not unlike, or they know people not unlike, Yates' protagonists Frank and April Wheeler. People like, for instance, the following: the lawyer who wants to be a novelist; the bartender who wants to be an actress; the consultant who wants to be a food critic; the advertising associate who wants to be an artist; the mother who dreads a life in the home.

In Revolutionary Road, as in life, two questions must be asked of such individuals. In no particular order: (1) are they selling short their dreams of being something, someone else; and (2) are their dreams the pie-in-the-sky fantasies of dreamers who couldn't cut it if they tried?

Yates addresses both in the story of Frank Wheeler -- a businessman plodding along in run-of-the-mill Manhattan skyscraper territory -- and April Wheeler -- a housewife who once thought she could be, and still wonders whether she could have been, an actress. Together, the couple strike out, but not without hesitation, for the 'burbs -- assuming that their Manhattan "sophistication" will make them "better" than their Connecticut neighbors, and that settling for a grassy pied-à-terre will spark an already faltering marriage.

The Wheelers were deeply unsatisfied with their lots in life, and with each other, before they moved to Connecticut. The move changes little. Individually, they still feel something is missing. Frank's dreams of success in business are going nowhere. April daydreams at home, with the help of more than a little liquor, about opportunities she feels she left behind in Manhattan. Pipe dreams for both? Or attainable dreams left to the wayside by stagnation and discontent? Yates suggests the possibility of either, in a narrative that's both sympathetic toward the emptiness in the Wheelers lives and, with plentiful dark humor, critical of the lives they've made for themselves and their illusions of the lives to which they believe they're entitled.

Multiple plot turns shouldn't be given away, save to say characters in a novel, like people in life, who are down, often look to various external things as means of solace. And, in a story that shapes up like this, there's going to be some tragedy along the way.

Many readers will identify with the characters. Perhaps in a discomfiting way. But it keeps the reader tuned in. As does Yates' sharp writing and calculatedly paced storytelling. Revolutionary Road is one of the more remarkable achievements in 20th Century American fiction.