La voz de los suburbios
12.21.2008
"Suburbs of Our Discontent" es el nombre que tiene la columna del gran Christopher Hitchens, en The Atlantic, sobre la novela del momento (gracias a Kate Winslet, insisto) Vía Revolucionaria, de Richard Yates. Debo agradecer, otra vez, a Diego Salazar que me haya pasado este enlace como tantas otras veces ha colaborado desinteresadamente con Moleskine Literario. Junto a Daniel Mordzinski, dos auténticos socios honorarios de este blog. Dice Hitchens ("Hitch" para los friends):
The achievement of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road was to anatomize the ills and woes of suburbia while simultaneously satirizing those suburbanites and others who thought that they themselves were too good for the ’burbs. It is also the reason why the novel can seem, and in the literal sense is, dated. Published in 1961 and set in 1955, this psychodrama of an ambitiously named development in Connecticut (the source of Yates’s superbly misleading title) recalls us to the period that saw the publication of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), the pop sociology of men like William H. Whyte and Vance Packard, whose critiques The Organization Man (1956) and The Hidden Persuaders (1957) made American business seem impersonal and cynical, and—if this isn’t too fanciful—Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Malvina Reynolds’s song “Little Boxes,” both of which made their debut in 1962. Pete Seeger had a huge success of his own with the song, which ridiculed the harmless citizens of Daly City, California, and gave us the word ticky-tacky. No less a man than Tom Lehrer was to say that it was “the most sanctimonious song ever written,” but this insight would be buried by later developments in the ’60s, when removal to the suburbs became a polite synonym for “white flight” (see the mythscape of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Detroit) (...) Frank and April Wheeler are the reverse of the unhappy family in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. They have already tasted the fruits and sweets of the big city, and qualified as urban—perhaps better say urbane—sophisticates. But you know how it is. Pregnancy comes to April a teeny bit earlier than had been anticipated (or desired), and the distressing need to earn some actual money is then imposed upon Frank, who must martyr his aestheticism to the brute requirements of “the firm.” Soon enough the days become regulated by the commute and, of course, by the needs of the children. Even so, the lost Bohemia of their Greenwich Village period will not be denied, and before too long Frank and April are smilingly condescending to help out a local troupe called, with brilliant ominousness, the Laurel Players. They decide to build up the spirit of community theater with a production of The Petrified Forest. I shall simply say that I don’t remember ever feeling so sorry for a set of fictional characters. If Yates had one talent above all, it was for conveying the feeling of disappointment and anticlimax, heavily infused with the sort of embarrassment that amounts to humiliation. As the full horror of the first night, and the full catastrophe of April’s own performance, become apparent, Yates catches the ghastly moment by writing, “The virus of calamity, dormant and threatening all these weeks, had erupted now.”
Etiquetas: diego salazar, edmundo paz soldan, eeuu, hitchens, NOTICIA, richard yates
