Following up on Richard Yates (see last year’s post, Double Feature: Revolutionary Road and That Darned Chatbot), I came across his collection of short stories from 1962, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. These stories are wonderful and deserve all the praise they’ve received. As the title of the book kind of indicates, the stories are unrelentingly bleak. They’re funny and entertaining, but bleak. Reading them was kind of like getting punched in the stomach 11 times. Which, ok, yeah, it doesn’t sound like much of recommendation, but I do highly recommend the book!

Revolutionary Road was bleak, too, so that aspect of Yates’s stories did not surprise me, but there was one big difference. In Revolutionary Road, you get the sense that the characters are tragic figures, going through their lives and taking wrong step after wrong step in a predetermined, necessary way, on the way to their sorry fates. The central irony of Revolutionary Road is not the characters’ failure to achieve their hopes, but rather the small stakes: not a Greek tragedy, it’s the alcohol-soaked middle-class suburbs. The dramatic but ultimately deflating title–the characters are not in fact on the road to any revolution–reinforces this point.

In contrast, the protagonists of the eleven stories in Yates’s collection have choices. They have “agency” (a topic I’ve discussed a couple times before; see here and here) and they do make decisions; the tragedy is that they end up in despair anyway. This is not a the sort of tragedy where the attempt to avert the prophecy leads to the prophecy being true; it’s more that the decisions made by the characters are never enough for them to avoid their fate.

Overall, Yates’s stories remind me of those of F. Scott Fitzgerald. They’re social documents in the manner of John O’Hara but with characters and plots that I find more convincing. In their directness, they prefigure later short-story writers such as Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver, but, again, Yates’s stories seem more real to me. The only thing I find dated and jarring is his use of dialect (“terlet” for “toilet,” etc.), which, I know it’s part of the stories but it just seems distracting to me, in the same way that I find it distracting if writers make too frequent use of typographical tricks such as the use of italics for emphasis. That’s a minor thing, though.

Going meta

Much of what’s been written about Richard Yates is on the meta-topic of why his writing is not more popular despite his critical acclaim. An obvious reason is that Yates’s stories, humor-filled as they are, are pretty much unrelenting downers. In my earlier post, I compare to John Updike and Philip Roth, noting that a big difference is that those other writers scored salacious late-sixties bestsellers, which kept these authors in the conversation and led readers to return to their earlier work. Had Yates produced a bestseller later in his career, I think his early books could’ve become popular too. Also, Yates didn’t write for the New Yorker and, as I also wrote in my earlier post, by the time Revolutionary Road came out, the time had passed for his criticism of the emptiness of the criticism of the emptiness of suburbia.

Finally, Yates was writing in a time when there still were literary superstars: the aforementioned Updike and Roth, also James Jones, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and others. After that came the literary-journalist superstars (Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, etc.), and now there’s not much of anybody at all. Literary stars like Sally Rooney don’t occupy anything like the cultural bandwith of the Gore Vidals of the earlier era–I’m not saying Rooney has less breadth than Vidal, just that her slot in the culture is much less. Richard Yates gets as much respect as modern masters such as Lorrie Moore or Garry Shteyngart or whatever, it’s just that expectations are lower. Nobody asks why Moore and Shteyngart don’t sell a zillion copies, because there’s no longer a mass audience for non-genre literature; in contrast, Yates could see the frustrating comparison to contemporaries such as Roth, Updike, etc., not to mention precursors such as John O’Hara and John P. Marquand.

Speaking of Roth: his first book, “Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories,” is fine, and it’s a cultural milestone–he got a jump on the generation gap–but, as fiction, I think the stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness are much better; they just seem much more real and with more respect for the autonomy of the characters. And people keep going on about Roth. So, yeah, I see the frustration.

P.S. I looked up Yates on wikipedia and it pointed to this article by Stewart O’Nan from 1999, “The Lost World of Richard Yates.” It’s good. I’d never heard of Stewart O’Nan so I looked him up too . . . it seems that he’s published 20 novels and has co-authored with Stephen King. Wow–there are a lot of busy writers out there! Which I guess is part of the story.