Alaska Employment Law

Though some critics loved it, the movie version of Revolutionary Road has gotten mixed reviews, so I thought before seeing it I should read Richard Yates’s 1961 book of the same name, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1962.  The title refers to the banal suburban street in Connecticut where Frank and April Wheeler, a couple in their 30s, have bought their first house in the suburbs.  It’s 1955.  Frank commutes to Manhattan for a tedious marketing job with Knox Office Machines (sort of a faux-IBM).  He hates his job and he despises most of those around him, including his neighbors on Revolutionary Road.  Bored, he has an inconsequential affair with a secretary at Knox.  April, whose childhood was almost unbearably sad, stays at home with two small kids and a desire to be an actress.  (The book opens on her performance in Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest, which some local players have put together, not too successfully.)  While a good deal of the book focuses on Frank’s interior monolog (which I imagine is difficult to get on film), it is April who possesses the book’s real intelligence.  In a kind of desperate selflessness that reveals how much she wants Frank to be the bohemian he pretends to be, she persuades him that the family should move to Paris so that Frank can discover his real artistic and intellectual callings.  Her suggestion at first excites Frank, but we perceive that he lacks the courage to go.  It’s pretty clear that there won’t be a happy ending, but I didn’t see it coming.  Good book.  Sad story.

Looking for a cheerier moment, I bought the DVD of the Kinks’ concert movie One for the Road (1980), which gives us about 65 re-sequenced minutes of a concert about that time at the Providence Civic Center (where I saw the band in the early 1970s).  There is nothing MTV about this film; it’s not high gloss, and that’s perfect.  Ray Davies trots out every cliché he has, and they’re all fun.  At about this point in their career the Kinks were touring behind their album Low Budget, a record well suited to our times, too.  Sample lyrics:

Cheap is small and not too steep
But best of all cheap is cheap
Circumstance has forced my hand
To be a cut-price person in a low budget land
Times are hard but we’ll all survive
I just got to learn to economize

One for the Road is also available as a CD, which includes more songs from this show.  If you don’t know the music of the Kinks, or for that matter Ray Davies or Dave Davies solo, you are missing one of the great bodies of rock’n’roll music of the 20^th century.  They always cheer me up.  They’ll cheer you up, too.