Name: The Collected Stories of Richard Yates
Rating: 4.5 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9781446420812

Richard Yates

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic pretensions, Yates ruthlessly examines the hopes and disappointments of ordinary people with empathy and humour.

The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

The Collected Stories

Tim Pendry

'Collected Stories' includes two published collections ['Eleven Kinds of Loneliness' (1962) and 'Liars in Love' (1981)] alongside seven stories that had not appeared in print before and two more (quite lightweight) that appeared only in the prestigious 'Ploughshares' magazine in the mid-1970s. I left this collection with mixed feelings. Yates is rightly positioned as an articulate literary 'spokesman' for male anxieties in the conformist post-war world. From that perspective, the 1962 collection is superb. It is a snapshot of a felt reality from a very sensitive young writer. On the other hand, I am not sure Yates is well served by the full collection because what it tends to suggest is that his range was limited and his approach psychotherapeutic, unloading personal anxieties in a way that over time shows little progression. If you read his biography and then review his stories you can see him plundering his own experiences, re-telling them through fictional scenarios where the tendency seems to be to mask himself somewhere between memoire and imagination. His childhood is replayed. His personal insecurities are clearly in evidence in a remarkably self-deprecatory way. The war experience and time in a tuberculosis hospital return repeatedly as do trips to Europe. There is one story revisiting his time as a Hollywood scriptwriter. The mixed feelings come from a sense of a considerable talent losing itself in an introspection that was being deprived of its social meaning as the world moved on from his childhood, wartime and marital demons. Yet often (earlier rather than later) he hits that sweet spot of revelation. For example, he captures how the behaviour of the relatively young post-war American generation would act in a way reflecting Hollywood gestures and language. The tension between a rather grey reality and the dream factory is not overtly stated but it is present. What is most moving perhaps is his ability to conjure up what it must have been like for very young conscripts in the last year of the war, thrown into danger with very little idea of what was happening or perhaps even why. Whether he was actually in danger on the front or in a TB hospital cannot be judged from the tales. The internal evidence of the stories could be read as him imagining from his own experience or from that of people he knew but he is imagining situations in which he lived as observer or as participant. The early stories are most insightful on what we now call 'gender relations'. Even if we discount what might be attributed to personal neurosis, the dynamic between the sexes is not quite what later feminism from its self-interested perspective might want us to accept. The young American males of the 1950s had a very limited and unhealthy sexual education, bonded in an uncertain and contingent camaraderie in a war that then threw them back into a world defined by conservative cultural mores amidst women wholly uncomprehending of their trauma. Women are presented as fulfilling their roles much as men did - home and children on the one side and another uncertain and mutually cautious camaraderie of desk discipline on the other. Both roles were under an economic cosh where the line between prosperity and poverty remained very fine. The tone of Yates' stories is both accepting and mildly depressive. There is little resistance to conditions and puzzlement at the next set of young who, as beatniks first or hippies, decided not to accept conformity. Perhaps women broke free and men just remained puzzled over the coming years. The two genders may as well have been two collusive, symbiotic but different species in this post-war world with little mutual comprehension. Indeed, Yates's portrayal of 'how women think' is more stereotypical than not, observed from outside in the hope of understanding. More than once, women prove apparently 'intractable' and men to be in awe or fear of them even if expressed in petulant anger. Neither side really talks to each other. Both sides often engage in petty deceptions that seem necessary just to survive psychically in one piece. Having survived war as both near-death experience and unutterable boredom, very young males returned in often early marriage to people they only think they know through the smoky glass of love (actually just desire) and then spend the rest of their lives 'coping' until something snaps. Yates explores a wide range of largely male responses to their situation. It is no surprise to find a potential equivalent of Kesey's Nurse Ratched emerging in one of the TB hospital stories. If there is anxiety about women (more than about sex), it is not, however, truly misogynistic. Women are clearly just 'the other' in these stories. Conformity is a contract between two 'othering' communities to maintain the world as it should be. Politics is not very present in the stories but we might find it curious that this is regarded as 'freedom' in contrast to communism. Children appear as that which binds but also as selfish and demanding while Yates' childhood alter egos are insecure, overawed by stronger wilful females. Yates' own mother lurks in the wings periodically as a psychological issue that we will have to leave to the professionals to assess. My recommendation is to make a real effort to read the initial 1962 collection and only the rest as footnotes to the stories although it will not be time wasted. There are certainly a few gems in the full collection - notably 'The Canal' which captures different soldierly reactions to the same incident. Yates has a strong reputation amongst literary types. We can see why. He is a master of the craft of writing. He knows how to fictionalise experience and to bring human tensions into the open although not with any resolution (for often there is no resolution). Perhaps the lack of 'success' for him later in life was because (if his short stories are anything to go by) he could not stop rehearsing issues that he never resolved but which had ceased to be of interest as society moved on. As a snapshot of a generation from one gender's point of view, his work excels.

A literary event of the highest order, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates brings together Yates's peerless short fiction in a single volume for the first time. Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate, and technically accomplished writers of America's postwar generation, and his work has inspired such diverse talents as Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, André Dubus, Robert Stone, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. This collection, as powerful as Yate's beloved Revolutionary Road, contains the stories of his classic works Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (a book The New York Times Book Review hailed as "the New York equivalent of Dubliners") and Liars in Love; it also features nine new stories, seven of which have never been published. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers, the grim humor that atts life on a tuberculosis ward, or the moments of terrified peace experienced by American soldiers in World War II, Yates examines every frayed corner of the American dream. His stories, as empathetic as they are unforgiving, are like no others in our nation's literature. Published with a moving introduction by the novelist Richard Russo, this collection will stand as its author's final masterpiece.

Melody Izard

I read this right after finishing the biography of Richard Yates. The stories in the collection all contain an element of autobiography. Yates life stories bubble forth in a sort of twilight zone style. My only complaint is that they do become a bit repetitive.

Gathers the distinguished late author's most current tales of short fiction in a single, comprehensive volume. By the author of Revolutionary Road, A Special Providence, Disturbing the Peace, and The Easter Parade. Reprint.

The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

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