Revolutionary Road is the movie of the moment, and a well-made and well-acted movie it is, too. But the view of the world that it conveys is a very familiar one indeed, namely that suburban life in America stifles individuality and creativity, and, in fact, is a form of living death. Inescapable frustration drives the film’s heroine to measures that kill her. Hopes and dreams in such a setting are impossible, just delusion.

Richard Yates, author of the novel on which this movie is rather faithfully based, was a colleague of mine in the mid-1960s when we were both teaching creative writing in the University of Iowa. Dick, as he was known, presented himself as an East Coast gentleman, wearing a three-piece suit for his classes, superior in manner to everyone, not to say snobbish. One day, he urged me to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s diaries, and quoted how Fitzgerald on a visit to Princeton had observed (I haven’t checked my memory of the exact wording), “the faded banners on the chapel wall.” Dick was on the look-out for memorials. A glance at his pale and pudgy face was enough to reveal that here was a deeply unhappy man, so unhappy that he could not tolerate anything like happiness in others. By the end of the evening, he would be in his shirtsleeves, drunken and perspiring and vituperating about a failed marriage, and savagely resenting that he was not a household name. The identification with F. Scott Fitzgerald meant that he too had escaped the suburbs and was aspiring to a higher tragic fate. This cast of mind surely typifies the loathing of so many intellectuals in America and Europe for themselves and their own society.

His closest — perhaps only — friend in the English department was the writer R.V. Cassill, a native Iowan. At the time, Cassill was publishing obsessive articles to the effect that President Kennedy had been the victim of a giant conspiracy, and the Warren Report was a cover-up. Cassill also believed that the Jews of New York controlled national publishing, and made sure that he did not have the reputation he thought he deserved. One professor had a young wife from Czechoslovakia whose parents had been murdered in the war by the Nazis, and Cassill said to her, “Next time we’ll be sure to get you too.” After that, and the row that then exploded, Dick Yates was almost alone in sticking with Cassill, perhaps more out of bravado than shared prejudice. The pair of them would stalk together through the campus, as though the surrounding unhappiness they had created was final proof of their innate superiority.

Like Fitzgerald, Dick Yates died too young, with the pathos of unfulfilment clinging to him. As I sat through the movie, I couldn’t help wondering whether he would have changed now that his name and his work are suddenly in the headlines. Might his unhappiness have dissolved, and could he have found a wife and settled with her in the kind of pretty house with a lawn and trees that he had held in such contempt? As the film’s heroine takes the fatal steps leading to bloodshed and death, a man in a nearby seat suddenly fell to the floor, and cries and calls for an ambulance broke out in the cinema. But he had only fainted. The sight of blood had been too much for him. That fitted in very well with Dick’s view of the world.