Revolutionary Road is the story of our times

There are some writers who, whatever their initial reputation, drift from the public consciousness, the flame kept alive by readers and fellow writers who feel honour bound to introduce friends into what can quickly risk becoming a priesthood of the initiates. Richard Yates was one such. His first book, Revolutionary Road, appeared in 1961 and was nominated for the National Book Award.

He wrote other books, including the impressive The Easter Parade (1976), but print runs were usually abbreviated. Magazines showed little interest in his short stories. His work went out of print, was resurrected, faded away.

He suffered from depression, smoked, and fuelled himself with more alcohol than was good for him. When he died, in 1992, he was reduced to carrying a portable oxygen tank because of lungs ruined by TB and emphysema.

Since then he has been largely forgotten. But not by everyone. Kurt Vonnegut was an admirer, Richard Ford declared a debt to him and in Britain David Hare waved a banner. And, of course, Sam Mendes has made a film version of that first, great novel.

The film of Revolutionary Road has won few plaudits from the critics nor taken many awards in the long prize-giving season that culminates on Sunday with the Oscars. But it has at least put more paperbacks on shelves and given another generation of readers the chance to have the air sucked out of their lungs by Yates's prose. Because the world he describes - suburban New England, as the 1950s edged into the 1960s - ­ is hermetic.

The central characters are the Wheelers, moving grudgingly into their thirties, aware at some level that they have failed while unable to identify the precise nature of that failure. They move into Revolutionary Road, one of those modern developments which never quite assure those who live there that they have arrived at whatever destination they imagined themselves to aspire to.

A schizophrenic man is one of the only characters to name things as they are

Frank thinks of himself as a "kind of Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man," as well he might as beneath him is an existential void. He has enough awareness to be conscious of inadequacy but not enough to understand his responsibility for it. His wife sees herself as a support operation until, suddenly, she does not and their world begins its slow collapse.

There are hints of Sinclair Lewis here, as there is of the Ernest Hemingway of the short stories (Yates uses the word 'brilliantly' as only Hemingway had done to convey a sense of an inappropriate emotional response). These, though, are no more than nods of