THE PREDICAMENT of forgotten writers, or "writer's writers" as they're called, is that the readers who do remember them are often complicit in a clubbiness that helps keep the neglected work under wraps. Part of the kick in discovering a great, obscured book lies in learning a kind of "cultural-literary secret handshake," as Richard Ford writes in his introduction to the latest edition of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road (to be reissued April 25, by Vintage). But if anything should be shared, it's Revolutionary Road, the only one of Yates's seven novels and two collections of short stories still in print. First published in 1961 -- but set in 1955, in a Connecticut commuter town -- it's a wonderfully wretched portrait, as damning as it is tender, of a promising young couple made miserable by the sneaking suspicion that they're not exceptional. And while at this point, the suburban landscape is well-trod terrain, few have trod it so startlingly well as Yates did nearly forty years ago.

Revolutionary Road centers on Frank and April Wheeler, whose troubles stem largely from their sense of being too "interesting" for their mediocre surroundings yet too ineffective to do anything about it. April, a "mildly talented, mildly enthusiastic graduate of dramatic school" reluctantly tends to the house and two kids; Frank supports them with a mindless corporate job; and they vainly dream of going to Paris to tap their unrealized potential and salvage whatever affection they still have left for each other. With quick, deceptively simple strokes, Yates renders their dissolution in cringing detail. Take Frank's shot at talking an office secretary into sleeping with him: "And how did she feel about the death of Dylan Thomas? And didn't she agree that this generation was the least vital and most terrified in modern times? He was at the top of his form. He was making use of material that had caused Milly Campbell to say 'Oh, that's so true Frank!' and of older, richer stuff that had once helped to make him the most interesting person April Johnson had ever met. He even touched on his having been a longshoreman." His attempt is made all the more pathetic by its success (the old longshoreman line works every time!) and the struggle against becoming a cliché becomes the biggest cliché itself.

The sly, understated humor coupled with exacting observations would make for bitter satire if there weren't such an emotional acuity driving the novel. Contempt for these characters is outweighed by a sad compassion for them -- men and women who can't help but assume "postures of controlled collapse," whose existence seems more theatrical than real. They perform their lives in front of picture windows and speak with "a quality of play-acting, of slightly false intensity," and they're all too aware of being this way. Self-consciousness as a literary conceit may be the one thing that's even more stale than the suburbs, but trying to be clever about it (in that postmodern sort of way) seems like a diversion that Revolutionary Road just doesn't have time for. It's too determined and relentless a book.

Yates charts a course for disaster and steers right into the heart of it without veering. The Wheelers, along with most of the others in the story, are doomed to fall and when the time comes (and it's only a matter of time), you know their humiliation is going to be unbearably degrading. But what's really terrible is that somehow it is bearable, thrilling even, to see Yates's characters suffer from the inadequacy of expression, and the resulting estrangement. Because the very existence of this book is a challenge to all that -- taking what seemingly can't be said and setting it down in words.