richard yates.

Revolutionary Road

The best of the short stories are amazing, and even the weak ones have their moments. The collected short stories take stamina though! There is a lot of sad stuff to take on all at once. For me anyway. You can definitely see why he is beloved by writers and not so much by a general public. It's tough stuff. Revolutionary Road only sold 8,000 copies when it came out even with good reviews. (Yates was pissed that The Moviegoer won the National Book Award. He felt like that would have changed everything for him. Same with his screenplay adaptation of Styron's Lie Down In Darkness. People who read it, including Styron, thought it was a masterpiece, and then the movie never got made and he never got all the money that he thought would enable him to write more.)

Oh, he was a sad case. Jeez, it's amazing really that he wrote as much as he did.

I said on the other thread that I wondered if I would have been so blown away by Carver in the 80's if I had read Yates first. Probably not. And Carver admitted his debt to Yates.

No, I never have. I need to read all the later stuff. I'm looking forward to them. I'm also kinda glad that I have them to look forward to! I've only read Easter Parade, Rev Road, and the stories. All in the last year or two. It's been a while since someone has blown me away like Yates has. (Alice Munro probably comes closest in recent years- going thru her collections.)

Revolutionary Road today. all of it?

I knew you'd love richard yates.

I think you'd like jean rhys too.

He seems very highly rated by some; Revolutionary Road in particular. Joan Didion claims to like the one I am reading, from first sentence to last: 'his best novel'.

I was going to start a thread about him; I am glad to find that one already exists, to be revived now.

Will Report Back!

scott, i felt the same way at the end of the book, that why i posted a paraphrase of the book's last line upthread. it's one of the only novels i can think of where the entire book seems to lead up to the last scene and only makes a kind of retrospective sense after those last few paragraphs.

I don't know - there must be a way of looking at the book that will yield a positive view. It is good if you like drinking. On every page someone not merely pours or buys, no, but ... fixes themselves another drink.

Did you guys hear?

Sam Mendes is directing the movie adaptation of 'Revolutionary Road', with Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet... Heads be explodin'

http://imdb.com/title/tt0959337

brought it up on this thread:

The Exley Thread and also "Minor American Realists"

i think i will now be yates-obsessed for another good two years at least. i want to talk about him and live with his stories the way teenagers wanted to about the rolling stones or something. have read everything except special providence and young hearts crying now (library had them out last time i went, supposedly his least accomplished works but whatever i'll judge for myself) and ok, so rating the others in order (and here this will be controversial i know)

1. Disturbing The Peace (which is uneven, but structurally awesome in its reflexiveness and twists. would have been so much stronger if it closed one scene earlier.)
2. Cold Spring Harbor (which is completely even and structurally awesome [all the stuff in the bio about the balancing act of third-person-limiteds is spot on], but thematically sort of slight, a book-length version of "The Best Of Everything")
3. The Easter Parade (like scott said, totally devastating and depressing. maybe only so low because i've lived with it for longer so feel less impressed by it)
4. Revolutionary Road (i can't justify why this is so low, except just that the other stuff is above it, also yeah he hadn't learned to handle time as elegantly and after reading his other work the parts that are forced about it feel more obviously so)
5. A Good School.

Top 5 yates stories:
1. Liars In Love
2. Saying Goodbye to Sally (almost a tie. both have so much going on in them and feel so careful and cutting in all the ways the characters interact. they're terribly sweet really.)
3. The Best of Everything
4. Trying Out for the Race (the two perspective shifts -- the strong one when the maid judges the families, then the subtle one when you realize it was the young boy's story all along -- are what clinch this)
5. A Glutton for Punishment

Hah - I just 'Glutton for Punishment' last night. It's my fave of 11KOL so far.

i've been meaning to read Yates for AGES... but never seem to get round to picking up one of his books. but after reading this thread i think i'll go to the library and get out a couple of his books right away.

The bio ("A Tragic Honesty") is a great read & considering how much of Yates's work is thinly disguised autobiography (and his extensive use of family and other acquaintances as characters) really illumates the work.

the end section of tragic honesty does sort of devolve into various descriptions of yates' ailments in increasingly morbid and forensic detail tho... also, realizing how autobiographical the easter parade is mighta ruined it a bit more than it should have for me, especially because i think the case is somewhat overstated.

what i really like about the longer stories in Liars... is how it feels like he's tapping into a secret logic of human relations in terms of how their scope and messiness doesn't stop them from being fastidious and each detail seeming perfect.

the ease of his sort of understated irony is also impressive, where all these themes are lurking underneath in the later stories but he doesn't come out throttling you and screaming "get it!?" and so they're really deceptive in that sense.

What struck me In Revolutionary Road was the understated humor in it and how modern that brand of humor was.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,,2257429,00.html

These adaptations sound like bad news.

Revolutionary Road I can imagine and have actually been looking forward to, but a film of The Easter Parade sounds like a sort of impossible notion, at least as a straightforward rather than artsy proposition. Too much summary narration. Too epic. Cold Spring Harbor (haha btw the article spells the title the britishes way) would be a better choice + its his best thing ever.

Finally reading the last bits of yates I never got to. Finished A Special Providence and its as half-there as everyone says. Some nice stuff, but waaayy all over the map. In the middle of Young Hearts Crying now and enjoying it quite a bit however. It seems to be taking its time in getting particularly painful, but I imagine that things will start falling apart quite nicely in due time.

Half the stuff in A Special.. was better done (okay, magnificently done) in "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" and the rest in "A Compassionate Leave" and "Jody Rolled the Bones".

I bought Young Hearts Crying during a Yates binge, but it's the only one I haven't managed to read -- let us know if it's really his worst.

I agree that RR would make a better film than the Easter Parade -- I think the narration is key too -- I can't imagine a film that handles Emily's aging as deftly w/o it. But even though there are a number of ways in which RR lends itself to an adaptation, I'd be surprised if a contemporary version (directed by SAM MENDES) is anything other than another shrill domestic drama.

they should have made it a mini-series. every chapter a separate installment. Revolutionary Road that is. every chapter is a movie all by itself!

Lovely new covers for all of his books shown here: makes we wish I could justify to myself the buying of them again.

i don't like those covers much. i don't think i like book covers with images of people on them, whether they are supposed to be the characters or not.

i like them! the 50's thang isn't usually done that well.

They're mostly v. nice, though I'm confused why they're releasing the two short story collections instead of just the Collected... Cold Spring Harbor's cover doesn't quite seem to fit, and nor really does Liars In Love's. Cold Spring Harbor the woman must be the daughter b/c she looks too young to be the mother, but the book's hardly about her at all... Liars in Love the woman is... who? from Saying Goodbye? or from Natural Girl? A painted woman of London would have been awsome for that cover. Also Revolutionary Road they look a bit too together and sophisticated.

From the Random House website the Collected Stories is coming later--I guess they're trying to double their money.

picking away at young hearts still. the first section did sort of drag, but part two so far, where he focuses on Lucy, who is a far more interesting character than Michael, is really awesome -- has a bit of a set piece quality so far and i'm not sure if he can tie it together properly, but both the theater sequence and the literary workshop sequence were completely devastating, and there's light touches of the same not-really-metafiction that was in disturbing the peace. hit me reading this that yates is so good with the theater scenes maybe because so much of what he deals with is really the anxiety of acting and authenticity, which he spells out in some detail here -- his characters are always performing, and generally slipping here and there.

I'm hoping the rest of the book justifies the Michael/Lucy switcharoo, which is a pretty classic yates thing actually -- cf the subtle way you understand who the story was *really* about in "joining the race." -- and, er, the not-so-subtle way in Good School.

There are already a couple things he does with time and perspective here that are really incredibly deft and I had to stop and reread them each a few times. Of course its no Cold Spring Harbor, but, what is.

speaking if which, i've reversed my position on cold spring vs.. disturbing. the latter is more fireworky, but the former is so incredibly perfectly formed that i don't think i'll ever shake it. its sort of the final proof of what yates meant when he said that all his writing was experimental.

finished RR.

the book gets into my "it was good,but" category.
no denying Yates has the power of creating a great story structure - he knows how to organize the narrative and keep the readers attention close till the very end, but compared to realists like Updike or Moravia, that wrote at the same time about more or less the same subject, Yates seems kinda flat.and the book,finally reads like a short story that became a novel.
the "ideas", and characters psychology are clear enough somewhere near the middle and doesnt develop much, and all we left is the twist and turns of the plot.
also,Yates descriptions of the american suburb family are coming as a banal cliches (maybe not his fault, and they did seem punchier when the book was written,but they don't now).
Yates doesnt have the rich details of Updike's writing (that make his books more authentic ,and who goes deeper than Yates does,sometimes on the price of getting the narrative forward).

Yates win points in keeping the tension up,also,his sense of irony is strong enough to create an emotional effect on the reader.

I liked RR, but the 'damaged wisdom' of John Givings the problem son was too heavy -- entertaining character though.

The film version is not a total wreck (I partic liked DiCaprio), but I can't give it much more than that.

There's a new article about Yates on/in the New Yorker website/magazine.

One of the few James Wood essays that offered no new insights, alas.

anyone read Young Hearts Crying? It's the only other Yates novel not checked out of the library.

A,LS: I didn't notice it was Wood. He keeps cropping up in ILB topics, like the ghost at the banquet.

Woods connects the Yatesian suburban macho-at-bay protagonist to Mad Men. That whole context of Mad Men's contemporaneous protrayal of such should go to the Mad Men thread, but Yates was prob the bard of it ("bard"= *literary*--vs. pop bestsellers like The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit, non-fiction like The Organization Man, and a lot of movies)Woods thinks he peaked quality-wise with R R, kept compulsively rehashing ever after, which was my impression too (he was living that suburban etc psychodrama too, so an approximately endless struggle of his artistic vs. other aspects)

"Mad Men's contemporaneous" etc: meaning the real-life Mad Men, by early 60s were surrounded and preceded and tagged by well-established representations (starting at least as far back as the late-40s best-seller and movie The Hucksters, movie starring Clark Gable, whose character def. between Rhett Butler and Mad Men's Don Draper, among other overqualified misfits)

i didn't like Revolutionary Road much.

i'm sure there's a thread somewhere on ile or ilb where s.clover says that mad men is jsut the tv version of richard yates

on MONDAY I saw some Yates books in Borders that had promising quotes and I made a note to check him out eventually, on TUESDAY I saw this topic, and TODAY I found The Easter Parade and A Special Providence for £1.50 each. I'm taking it as being somehow meaningful. Which should I read first?

all of the RR film reviews are lazily invoking Mad Men (of course, maybe that's why the movie was greenlit)

Merdeyeux, I suspect you can't go wrong starting with 'The Easter Parade' or some of his ace short stories.

ive been reading 'a tragic honesty', it's really good. would you believe ive never read anything by him yet? idk i dont think reading this bio first will spoil anything

this is a great lil piece abt meeting & interviewing him in boston

http://www.tbns.net/elevenkinds/napersteck.html

His daughter Monica once dated Seinfeld co-creator, Larry David and David's first meeting with the writer was the basis for "The Jacket" episode of Seinfeld's second season.

always thought this was supposed to be norm mailer for some reason.

almost done w/ "Young Hearts Crying" -- even w/ the shifting narratives, it feels v autobiographical in a way, def his own personal voice and thoughts in a lot of it, but it does work imo; it's really abt dealing w/ envy, coping, being 'happy' or at least dealing w/ settling for less than you dreamt of as you age out of your youth..

even though in some sense it has some of the biggest dumbest stuff of any of his novels, i think about it a lot.

if you like the autobiographical touch you might also like Disturbing the Peace?

fuck now i need to reread everything by yates again

I was really concerned that this would be a Tao Lin thread

phew