![]() ![]() I think he was right, which is why there is no extraordinary event in the life of Mrs. “They eat cabbage soup and fall off stepladders. “I believe it was Chekhov who observed that people do not go to the North Pole, or whatever,” he once said. The basis of both books is Connell’s suspicion that, in life as it is really lived, repression rarely ruptures. ![]() A far truer (and less sexist) portrait of the stifling complacency of suburban life can be found instead in a pair of little-remembered novels by Evan S. Yet these stories are less about repression than about the dark or comic consequences of rebellion: Rabbit runs off with a sex worker, Yates’s Wheelers have affairs and secret abortions, and Portnoy-well, you get the point. What are the definitive midcentury novels of suburban repression? One might point to John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Connell b y Steve Paul University of Missouri Press, 412 pp., $45 Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. ![]()
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