I identify so deeply with the writing of Richard Yates and am ashamed to just now read his collected stories. Sure, I've read many of them in anthologies and of course Easter Parade and Revolutionary Road. To read the stories is to admit that Yates drew the bulk of his material from his life experience: World War II, tuberculosis, Hollywood screenwriting, failed marriages, and a dash of current events. "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" remains one of my favorite stories of all time with it's frustrated sculptor mother whose pride causes her to say hateful things and embarrass her children who hold fast to their sense of imagination for hope. "Saying Goodbye to Sally" is an homage to Yates time in Hollywood. He compares his adventures to those of F. Scott Fitzgerald (fun for Fitzgerald nuts like me). From his salty-hut of a writing studio by Malibu beach to the drama of Beverly Hills and the glamour of expensive hotel-bar cocktails after a day of work, he makes me miss LA only I know that it is his LA and not a shade close to the one I had. The collection has a wonderful introduction by Richard Russo, a writer clearly inspired by Yates. In the introduction, Russo recalls that his former student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, John McNally, collected used copies of Yates books so that he could hand them to anyone who hadn't discovered what a terrific writer he was yet. I find this charming and funny as Yates is brilliant but certainly not for everyone. His greatest gifts are his keen observation and his ability to humiliate his characters. He will not look away from a character's worst suffering. And, the suffering is almost always sourced from loneliness and the variant directions of trouble that one feeling can push us towards.And little did I know until now, that Yates died not too far from me in Alabama when I was ten-years-old. He'd been teaching while in poor health at the University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa. I like to imagine that all those childhood trips to see Bama games in Tuscaloosa also held the sight of an aged Richard Yates passing me by. I doubt it but it's a nice thought. One last anecdote before quotes is that in college my mom took an active interest in what I was reading. She put down her pot boilers and was floored by books like The Bell Jar and stories by Harold Brodkey. Sylvia Plath considered her book a pot boiler and while it may be overly modified for my now MFA-critic self, it still holds a dear place for me. I doubt my mom admitted her new favorite reading to her P.T.A friends (she was the President) but it's remarkable how many women of her time looked for mystery novels less out of their craving for the macabre but their fear of how nuanced realism would make them feel. I have friends to this day that I'm sure my writing and others writing depresses. I can't imagine not being able to witness. I didn't realize until a bit after the time of my mom's reading my library that she wasn't just trying to be a friend to me but she was truly marveling over what she had missed by denying her own curiosities for fear of being defined by them.Below are favorite quotes culled from "The Collected Stories" but there are so many more I would have shared were it not for space and not boring you: "She never seemed to lose her temper, but it would almost have been better if she did, for it was the flat, dry, passionless redundancies of her scolding that got everybody down." From "Fun with a Stranger"I love his sense of self deprecation here -"Writers who write about writers can easily bring on the worst kind of literary miscarriage; everybody knows that. Start a story off with "Craig crushed out his cigarette and lunged for the typewriter," and there isn't an editor in the United States who'll feel like reading your next sentence. So don't worry: this is going to be a straight, no-nonsense piece of fiction about a cabdriver, a movie star, and an eminent child psychologist, and that's a promise. But you'll have to be patient for a minute, because there's going to be a writer in it too. I won't call him "Craig," and I can guarantee that he won't get away with being the only Sensitive Person among the characters, but we're going to be stuck with him right along and you'd better count on his being as awkward and obtrusive as writers nearly always are, in fiction or in life." From "Builders"Edith talking about the sound of NYC - "I don't mean just the loud noises," she said, "like the siren going by just now, or those car doors slamming, or all the laughing and shouting down the street; that's just close-up stuff. I'm talking about something else. Because you see there are millions and millions of people in New York--more people than you can possibly imagine, ever--and most of them are doing something that makes sound. Maybe talking, or playing the radio, maybe closing doors, maybe putting their forks down on their plates if they're having dinner, or dropping their shoes if they're going to bed--and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it's so faint--so very, very faint--that you can't hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time."And referenced again in the last sentence -"We would probably never see Bart again--or if we ever did, he would probably not want to see us. But out mother was ours: we were hers; and we lived with that knowledge as we lay listening for the faint, faint sound of millions." From "Oh, Joseph, I"m So Tired." That last sentence will always make me gasp!"She was a handsome woman, blond, sturdy, and still young, with a full-throated laugh for anything she found absurd, and this wasn't the life she had planned for herself at all." From "Trying Out for the Race" "It often seemed to Elizabeth that the best part of the day was when she was alone at last, curled up on the sofa with a drink, with her spike-heeled shoes cast off and tumbled on the carpet. Perhaps a sense of well-earned peace like this was the best part of life itself, the part that made all the rest endurable. But she had always tried to know enough not to kid herself--self-deception was an illness--and so after a couple of drinks she was willing to acknowledge the real nature of those evenings alone: she was waiting for the telephone to ring."From "Trying Out for the Race""I loved the girl who'd wanted to tell me all about "the theater," and the girl who'd stood calm and shy in the thunderclap of applause that followed her scene from Dream Girl. I didn't much like the dependable typist at Botany Mills, or the grudging potato peeler, or the slow, tired woman who frowned over the ironing board to prove how poor we were. And I didn't want to be married to anyone, ever, who said things like, "Oh, you can take care of what?" From "Regards at Home"
Only three stars for The Collected Stories of Richard Yates? Really? Really? My reservations regarding the largely arbitrary assignment of stars aside, three stars does seem like an uncommonly harsh review of a book that I really enjoyed, from an author who I really love. But three makes sense, I promise.Three stars because the quality of the first collection contained in this printing, 1962’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, is simply nowhere near the fine work that followed it or the gangbusters Revolutionary Road that preceded it. The dialogue is a little strained and the heft of the stories is not quite what he was capable of producing elsewhere. It’s surprising that the dialogue is so weak, given that he depicts dialogue so deftly in Revolutionary Road, but there it is. But outside of that, these stories simply seemed a little phoned-in and oddly same-y, a stopgap before bigger and better things.Three stars because the second collection, Liars in Love is just so fine, so inarguably superior to the stories from Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, that they seem as if they were written by a different author entirely. Given that 19 years separate these two collections, that’s probably not much of a stretch. But this is where the heart of the book is, and the stories from Liars in Love are what make this worth picking up. Here we find Yates’ ability to write the shallowness and calculated smallness that we, as a people, so often embody in our relationships with one another. Yates is amazing because he is so thoroughly incisive in his writing. To be able to recognize the sorry, shameful way that people so often act is remarkable in itself; to be able to write that so plainly and convincingly is something else entirely.Three stars because the uncollected, unpublished stories have a drafty quality you might expect, though they seem a little more adventurous and unrestrained, which is of course exciting. They’re not perfect, but their flaws make them attractive compared to the sheen of what was shown in Liars in Love. I like to read stories that show the author taking chances, even if all of those chances don’t pay off.Such inconsistency is to be expected of a comprehensive collection such as this one, and so three stars seems fair. It’s a collection of fine work by a striking, insightful author, who also shows himself to be imperfect. Very highly recommended, though I also recommend that you bring your patience. It’s worth the effort.
What do You think about The Collected Stories (2002)?
Richard Yates really does the whole mid century anxiety thing really well. His stories reminded me of John Cheever (to which I found out that Cheever was inspired by Yates- makes sense now) and a little bit of Updike. He obviously writes what he knows- military life, failed communication in relationships, and disconnection in general. I don't think this whole collection really struck me, just certain stories. But those stories are so good they make up for the rest. If you are looking for a joyful set of short stories, don't look here. His book Revolutionary Road, I think, is a little more shocking and intense than his stories are so if you are looking to be wowed, go with that.
—Gina
His settings are VA TB wards, dreary publishing offices inhabited by failed novelists, and awful relationships...He's at his best in the small ticks of people trying to live their lives, descriptions of hair and eyes and the way an angry wife turns away from her husband, or vice versa...at his worst when you realize that you've just finished 460 pgs of beautifully written, relentlessly sad and mostly unredeemed people...I'd place him a rung or two below Andre Dubus--they both write realistic stories about small people trying to live small lives well in America, and usually failing...the difference is Dubus has the sensitivity to elevate his most reprehensible characters to human beings striving for something great and holy, and almost--almost--getting there...Yates's characters, in the end, wallow...
—Jeff
This book contains the collections 'Eleven Kinds of Loneliness' and 'Liars in Love', and also some uncollected stories. The titles of both those collections are impeccably well chosen and accurate. It occurs to me that a technique for writing short fiction might be to think of the title of a collection before thinking of any individual story.Richard Yates is possibly the best value for money short story writer I have ever come across. There is not a single poor or unengaging story in the book. The quality is astonishingly consistent. Unlike with Raymond Carver, or a lot of contemporary collections, there is no story which leaves you thinking "What was the point of that?" The biggest theme in Yates's stories seems to be vulnerability. At times, one finds oneself captivated and horrified at the same time. An outstanding example of this is 'Doctor Jack-o'-Lantern'. This is that most technically difficult of writing projects - a story without a single empathetic character. The pleasure the reader gets is from the acuity of the observation of human behaviour, and the expertly controlled way the story unfolds. Yates began publishing these stories in the late 1950s. Many of them have an evocative, post-war atmosphere, like the American equivalent of Graham Greene. At the same time, the themes are universal and the style is contemporary. The settings and the life-styles of the characters are comparable to Carver's. The characters are unglamorous, often short of money, often hate their jobs or surroundings, and are nearly always unfulfilled. Another difficult feat that Yates achieves (several times) is to write engaging stories about characters who are writers. When I was collecting critiques of my story, 'Can We Have You All Sitting Down, Please?' a friend compared it to Richard Yates. I can now see a thematic resemblance - miscommunication, frustration, unfulfilment - and it is one of the greatest compliments my writing has ever been paid.
—William
