James Wood revisits Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, the great American novel of the suburbs:

“Revolutionary Road” is a brilliant rewriting of “Madame Bovary,” with one signal difference—at the end of Flaubert’s novel, both Emma and Charles Bovary lose, because she commits suicide and her dull husband is utterly bereft. In Yates’s savage inversion, the wife loses but the dull husband secretly wins: though deprived of wife and children, he prospers at work, and finally secures for himself the safe, settled world that his wife died trying to dislodge.

If I’d never read Revolutionary Road, chances are I’d’ve enjoyed AMC’s Mad Men rather than viewing it as a watered-down version of Yates’ “indictment of American life in the nineteen-fifties.”