The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

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Summary: Yates was criminally overlooked.
Review: It's perfectly understandable, I guess. His novels and stories move through detail after detail -- always thoroughly entertaining & bittersweet, but also muted. BIG MOMENTS don't scream at you; they happen & are absorbed into the fabric of each characters' lives -- simultaneously changing them and leaving them with every flaw perfectly in tact. His message is an unromantic one: pain doesn't create character; pain creates pain. Very few writers handle darkness as surely and poetically as Yates.

In every story & novel, Yates wastes no time getting to the matter at hand. This creates the impression that his will be an A-->B storyline, but Yates' detours are completely rewarding and earned. Rarely does anything feel forced or contrived in a Yates story. People act as people we know really act. Yates' dialogue is, in my mind, the best of any American post-war fiction writer -- it manages to be loose & realistic without relying on an onslaught of ums... ahs... or wells ...

Many of Yates' stories, as well as the novels "Revolutionary Road" and "A Good School" are nearly perfect, but it's quiet perfection, so he remains unfairly overlooked, while lesser writers get the gold star.

Rating:
Summary: Why has it taken so long?
Review: It's unfathomable why the works of Richard Yates have been out of print for so many years. Every person I recommend him to ends up wanting to read all of his books, asking questions about him I simply can't answer because I know little or any of his bio.

"Is he really that good?" Yes.

Finally, in one collection, are the master's collected stories culled from "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness" and "Liars in Love." The book also features additional uncollected stories, which are real treats for any Richard Yates fan (we've been plowing through dusty periodicals in decrepit libraries for these stories for years).

Readers long familiar with 50s writers like Salinger, Cheever, Updike, and later such scions as Tobias Woolf, Richard Ford, and Raymond Carver, will find similar terrain in Yates's stories, with one important distinction: the inimitable voice of Richard Yates. His gift is not with pretty language or literary prose - though that's not to say that he's minimalist - he's much too focused for tricks. Character is his number one concern.

The characters in Yates's world are so real they're frightening. Yates explores their self deceptions, their frailties, their constant attempts to buttress a withering self-esteem by false promises or vain illusions. For instance, "A Glutton for Punishment" - a story about a loserish young man who gets fired from his first "real" job and convinces himself that he won't tell his wife about it until he finds another. The character realizes, though, that it's the very drama of losing that's always been the motivating force of his life.

What sets Yates apart from most writers of his age - or any age - is his heart. It's large, gracious, compassionate without ever being sentimental.

I would go on--but the stories truly speak for themselves.

The publication of this volume is a literary event, akin to Malcolm Cowley's "rediscovery" of William Faulkner. It's time to take Yates off the "writer's writer" list, and make him finally accessible to the general population.

This collection will prove Yates to be one of the greatest American writers of the latter 20th Century. You will not be disappointed, but only scratch your head and say, "Why haven't I heard of this guy?"

*Don't stop here--read "Revolutionary Road," "The Easter Parade," "Cold Spring Harbor" and "A Good School."

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Summary: The Dark Side of the 1950's
Review: When soldiers came home from the war, they wanted everything to be normal, and that's just what they got. But buried underneath all the normalcy was human nature, roiling. This is America at its uncomfortable peak.

My favorite stories are about soldiers and veterans--especially the ones taking place at TB wards in VA hospitals. The men who survived the Depression and fought the war are reduced to waiting and coughing in crowded wards, watched over by nurses and doctors. You could almost say, if you went a little too far, that these stories capture the uniformity and sterility of the '50's in a nutshell.