Had April and Frank Wheeler been sorting out their unhappy suburban lives today instead of in the 1950s things might have turned out better. Right off, they could have gone to couple’s counseling. Maybe even had separate therapeutic life coaches, depending on Frank’s employee assistance plan.
Frank’s men group would have understood his need to go find himself. April would at least have been able to talk to her Facebook friends – “April is sitting in her knotty pine kitchen today wishing she had a different life.”

Instead of dropping everything to move to Paris, they could have gone online and swapped houses. Maybe found someone eager to trade a cramped Left Bank walk-up for a sprawling four bedroom with woodsy backyard.

I know it sounds like I’m making fun but that’s only because I walked out of the movie “Revolutionary Road” giving thanks for being too young in the 1950s to worry about adult things and having Betty Friedan waiting in the 1960s before I turned into an un-liberated April.

The 1950s were a pretty good time to be a kid, however, especially a middle class kid having the run of a safe neighborhood where most of the dads drove off in the morning and most of the mothers stayed home and the streets remained silent until school let out.

The 1950s were a good time to be a kid.

I had no idea if the parents in my own woodsy Connecticut suburb were feeling stifled and stuck. Last year when my book club discussed the Richard Yates novel, on which the film is based, we talked about what we as kids were doing in the 1950s. Who lived in the suburbs? Whose parents played Canasta and drank whiskey sours?

My mother, like every mother I knew except for one who sold real estate, didn’t work. I never questioned that she might have wanted to be something besides a housewife until I was in college, and she told me she always wanted to teach high school. My father was a company man, working his way up the management ladder at the same manufacturing plant as a lot of friends’ fathers. I never thought to ask if he had other dreams.

One movie reviewer of “Revolutionary Road” referred to the 1950s as “the alleged graveyard of American hope,” which is pretty ironic considering that the generation before had lived on little more than hope as they struggled through the Great Depression, World War II and the Korean War to make a better life for their kids. Many of those kids went on to become middle class home-owners with secure jobs and cars and Danish modern coffee tables, and, maybe for the first time, the luxury to ask “Is that all there is?”

Frank and April Wheeler rejected the common comfort of suburban life. Naturally, their peers both envied and resented them for daring to be discontent and thinking they were special. Today the Wheelers would be in good company, another couple of anxious Boomers trying to find themselves, with dreams they can’t afford. Of course in the current financial crisis, most everyone’s self fulfillment is on hold, at least until the 401ks bounce back. In the meantime you’re grateful to hang onto what you have, especially your house, even a faux colonial on Revolutionary Road.

Photo Courtesy of Interview Magazine