rev. of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates
Henry Holt, $28.00
cloth. Reviewed by Stewart O’Nan.
In the years since his death, Richard Yates has been that saddest of literary celebrities, the beloved but forgotten author. What’s most shocking about this is that he wrote not one but three great books. His early masterpiece,
Revolutionary Road, has barely remained in print, and his other brilliant novel,
The Easter Parade, is currently “indefinitely out of stock.” His third great book,
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, is included in this omnibus collection, along with his later stories from
Liars in Love, and nine previously uncollected pieces. Michael Chabon isn’t alone when he says he hopes this book will do for Richard Yates what Knopf’s big red collection did for John Cheever.
It may, and deservedly. The work is there, and still fresh, perhaps even definitive. Yates’s fifties stories of young and insecure Americans coming to grips with their less-than-ideal lives presages the work of Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, and Tobias Wolff. In his signature piece “The Best of Everything,” two working-class lovers realize their impending marriage won’t solve their problems — that in all probability it will only add to them. Yates’s language is stripped down, his tone — like their lives — flat and emotionless: “She tried to sound excited, but it wasn’t easy.” “Somehow he’d expected more of the Friday before his wedding.” That vague sense of letdown colors the story a dingy gray. The characters’ mix of hope and resignation is unsettling, yet rings true.
Like those later, more famous writers, Yates is most at home with unheroic characters, people on the fringes — lonely shopgirls and troubled kids, tubercular patients and disgruntled vets. No matter how downtrodden his people are, they still want to believe in their own unrecognized promise. Yates’s subject is disappointment, the bitterness that follows our losses, and often our complicity in those failures, our most cherished pretensions leading us astray. His little characters dream big, all the time fearing they’re impostors, terrified of being found out. And the world does strip them of their illusions, again and again, sometimes cruelly. Middle-class life is spiritually vacant and economically precarious, the promises America makes are hollow, and yet Yates’s people still chase after their impossible, often secondhand ideals.
This is true of the later stories as well. Though Yates wrote well into the mid-eighties, his frame remains the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, his focus the discrepancies between everyday life and the false promises of Wall Street and Hollywood, how we fall for the fleeting illusions of romantic love and money and fame-fitting for someone whose favorite author was Fitzgerald.
And it’s all done in a straight-ahead, lucid style, so plainspoken that for a while in the sixties and seventies he was scorned as old-fashioned, behind the times. The eighties vindicated him, but, far from being conservative, his work is subversive, telling us truths we’d rather not contemplate.
As a package, the book is flawless. Richard Russo’s introduction strikes exactly the right note, with its anecdote about his mother’s never-achieved dream house. The addition of the nine uncollected stories is a bonanza for Yates fans. The best of them, “Evening on the Cote d’Azur,” ranks with his finest work (appearing here in
Ploughshares back in 1976), and even the lesser efforts give the reader a peek at a writer warming to his material. The editor has wisely included them after the published stories rather than before — a mistake that makes the first hundred pages of
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor a torture.
Even better, Holt has plans to reissue
The Easter Parade and several other titles in the coming seasons. It’s good news for writers and readers who love the widely anthologized “Builders” and “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired.” It’s just a first step, but, with luck, maybe Richard Yates will receive his due.
Stewart O’Nan’s most recent novel is Everyday People
(Grove).
