If you saw the trailer for the Leonardo Di Caprio/Kate Winslet movie, you likely know that this book is about two attractive, charming and successful white people whose relationship and dreams die an agonizing death in the American suburbs. It will remind you of the Ice Storm and American Beauty (the director, Sam Mendes, also directed Revolutionary Road). It will also remind you of that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine goes crazy because her office celebrates everything with cake. "What? What is nice? Trying to fill the void in your life with flour and sugar and egg and vanilla? I mean, we are all unhappy. Do we have to be fat, too?"
The scenes of old men disappearing into a haze of oblivion while their wives desperately and annoyingly try to hold the world together will remind you of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. The scenes of characters clinging desperately to dreams that are clearly killing them will remind you of Requiem For A Dream.
This is a story of couples having devastating fights, yelling at their children, wasting away at jobs they hate among coworkers they despise and then returning home each night to baste in their disappointments and broken
dreams and hopeless fantasy escape plans. This is not a fun or hopeful story. The Road was more hopeful than this novel, and those guys were trying to avoid hungry cannibals!
I wonder if Revolutionary Road is the original text or template for this story line of despair? Were the ancient Greeks struggling with this stuff too in their version of the suburbs and office jobs, or is this type of angst specific to the modern era?
There isn't a lot of light or air in this book. It is kind of suffocating. And yet I couldn't stop reading it. Maybe because my brain was picturing di Caprio and Winslet playing the main characters the entire time. Those are two damn good looking actors. That's something, I suppose.
Have you seen the movie? Does it do the book justice?
ReplyDeleteI really liked the movie, I had no idea it was based on a book.
The trailer looked so scary that I couldn't bring myself to see the movie! It was just Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio yelling at each other and going crazy.
ReplyDeleteIt's a miserable film, and the story itself seems very dated now - a period piece, not a tale for all time. (Or is it just a victim of being the first of a type of story that has since become a cliche?) Anyway, must have been a bit of a shock to those who fell for the 'reuniting for the first time since Titanic' line of advertising that was used to promote a film that, if audiences knew what they were in for - yes, 2 hours of yelling, and other domestic miseries - no one would have bothered to see (and few did!). I wonder if the book is better, but I can't imagine putting myself through it. (Oh, and Winslet and Mendes have since divorced, so... what does that tell you?!?)
ReplyDelete