Richard Yates

One day last year, as I was walking home from work, so wrapped up in my own furiously careening thoughts that I wasn’t paying much attention to anything but the general direction my feet were taking me, I found myself momentarily halted in the middle of a crowd alongside Gramercy Park. As I looked around, it dawned on me that the men in the crowd were all wearing fedoras, like 1950s Madison Avenue executives, most of the women wore long pleated skirts to the knee and some had gloves on, and at the same time I realized that all the cars parked on the street were vintage models I remembered from my childhood. This prompted an eerie moment of disorientation before I realized that I had stepped into the middle of a movie shoot, in this case Revolutionary Road, based on the novel by Richard Yates. I clearly remembered the story of Frank and April Wheeler, whose lives in 1955 suburban Connecticut become inexorably and tragically unglued, but was strangely distressed to learn that a book by an author who was always sort of a secret treasure of mine was being given the big-time Hollywood treatment. Soon, I imagined, I’d be spotting people on the subway holding movie tie-in paperbacks with photos of Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the cover. Yes, great books are meant to be shared--but the act of reading them is inherently a private one, the emotions they engender are deeply personal, and I confess to a smug satisfaction in keeping certain books to myself.

It isn’t even that Yates is so much of a secret any longer. At the time of his death in 1992 he was out of print, virtually forgotten, his name and books known only to a select and cultish group of readers and a few admiring fellow writers. Much of this neglect was due to the fact that these novels and stories are not comfortable reading. Yates knows who you are: your weaknesses and cruelties, the humiliations you receive and inflict, even the lies you tell yourself in order to get through your day. His fiction is fashioned without a hint of contrivance or fabrication, wherever absolute truthfulness will lead, no matter how painful.  read more »