I’ve been depressed on behalf of novelist Richard Yates all week, ever since I read a recent article by Anne Thompson in the December 8-14 issue of weekly Variety.

“Why?” you might ask.

Go ahead. Ask.

All right, I’ll tell you.

It’s not merely because he’s dead. I never met him, and never felt the connection with him the way I did with Raymond Carver, who I truly mourned at the time of his passing, and who from time to time I find myself mourning anew.

Rather, I’m saddened due to the big-budget movie just made of his 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. You might think any writer, living or dead, would love to have that level of talent applied to adapting his or her work.

Yes, you might think so. But you’d be wrong. Because as the article states:

While at first the movie appears to be a close adaptation, and much of the dialogue and scenes do adhere to the book, it differs in one crucial way: It offers some hope. The movie leaves out much of the characters’ ugly backstory, and the characters’ plan to move to Paris isn’t just a silly, ridiculous fantasy. …

As embodied by Winslet and DiCaprio, the Wheelers are warmer and more sympathetic than Yates’ creations on the page.

So what we’ve got here is a true failure to communicate. The title of the film might be the same as the title of the book, and the character names might match, and the bare outline of the plot might be similar, but what you’ll see when going to a theater won’t be the story Yates wanted you to experience. It’s a bleak story Yates told, yes, but can’t bleakness have its day once in awhile?

As per the famous anecdote, Cliff Robertson fought to end his TV adaptation of Flowers for Algernon the way the story demanded. But no one, it seems, would stand and fight for Yates.

Hollywood obviously felt that the story was too dark for the screen, agreeing with the editors to whom he sent his stories:

The author suffered a lifetime in near-poverty writing skillfully honest fiction that many magazines deemed too harsh and cruel to publish. He collected one rejection slip after another, and tortured himself over such critiques as his “mean-spirited view of things,” from the New Yorker, whose fiction editor Roger Angell finally told the writer to give up and stop submitting, because he’d never get in.

For me, the article’s most poignant passage came at the end:

Yates may be one of those writers who cut too close to the bone, who bares his characters’ delusion and lies without trying to forgive them. He also denies them hope: “Revolutionary Road‘s” golden couple Frank and April Wheeler, who dream of Paris but can’t escape their American suburban nightmare, are doomed by their own upbringing. They don’t stand a chance against Yates’ own pessimism.

Almost completely forgotten toward the end of his life, Yates sat down and read the first chapter of Revolutionary Road out loud and “cried like a baby,” says Monica Yates. “That was because he knew that he had done something great, and his life was ending, and he had that.”

Yates had done something great because he had told what he felt was a great truth, and out of that great truth, even though it was an ugly truth, he made beauty. A beauty obviously far too much for Hollywood.

Thank God Yates is not around to see his message mangled.

Alan Moore may be angry at the makers of Watchmen. But believe me, whatever hash is made of Moore’s graphic novel, he’ll be getting off easy as compared with Richard Yates.