was his knowledge that any number of sanctimonious people had agreed to hang that bleak and terrible label on F. His affair with his agent's secretary is doomed to bitter dissolution not so much by Jack's short-term contract as by the fine print in his soul, which allows him "to entertain the thought that he might be a self-destructive personality after all." Then "What saved him. But this apparent release from the ordinary only lands him in a different sort of solitude. ![]() Jack Fields, the young writer in "Saying Goodbye to Sally," also seems to have escaped from the crushing grayness of the American middle when he gets a novel published and is then invited out to Hollywood to work on a film. As Yates wrote of the older of the pair, "if self-deception was an illness she was well into its advanced stages." Like so many of his characters, these women try to bolt the door against bland convention but manage only to lock it in. Thus the two women who attempt to set up a liberated, cosmopolitan haven in Westchester County in "Trying Out for the Race" soon find their idyll ruined by their own weakness and petty squabbling. ![]() Although his stories have their share of unimaginative housewives and gray-flannel men who sink without a trace into the vast oatmeal of the American monoculture, the real pitfall facing his characters comes when they try to convince themselves that salvation lies outside of the ordinary. Again and again Yates's people misdiagnose the cause of their loneliness as a boring job or a conventional marriage, when these are in fact merely symptoms of a desolation that endures even after they manage to break free of the mainstream. Although many of his characters initially seem to be suffering from simple cases of the suburban blues (nothing that a trip to Paris or a year off to write that novel wouldn't cure), it soon becomes clear that the facile distinction between the bourgeois and the bohemian is a reflection of the characters' own self-delusion rather than of the author's agenda. From the tentative efforts of his first collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962), which enumerated various strains of human isolation (an adopted boy in a new school two Americans out of their depth in the jazz clubs of postwar France) with an almost scientific precision, to the mature genius of late stories such as "Liars in Love" and "Saying Goodbye to Sally," Yates proved himself to be without equal as a chronicler of American solitude. This bleak vision pervades Yates's Collected Stories, written over a period of thirty years but set almost exclusively during the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations. At its heart his fiction is a painful exploration of the solitude that afflicts us all, whether we are bourgeois or bohemian, city dwellers or suburbanites. His writing is more than just a protest against the sterility of the suburbs and corporations that overtook the American landscape during the 1950s. But with the passage of time it is becoming clear that Yates's achievement was of a different order from his contemporaries'. Novelists as diverse as Jack Kerouac and John O'Hara also howled against their era, while social critics ranging from the best-selling Vance Packard to the deeply analytic Herbert Marcuse protested the corporate conformity that afflicts so many of Yates's characters. ![]() Of course, Yates, who died in 1992 at the age of sixty-six, was not alone among his writing peers in providing a dissenting perspective on the so-called Greatest Generation. Set in an era when American triumphalism was achieving its self-congratulatory summit, Yates's work consistently reminds the reader of the depths awaiting those unable to make the climb. ![]() Moments of joy or communion are as brief and bittersweet for them as day trips from a convalescent ward. Solitude and sorrow pervade his fiction, marking it so deeply that his reluctant suburbanites, demobilized GIs, corporate drones, and dreamy women seem to be unwittingly engaged in the pursuit of unhappiness. Richard Yates just might have been the saddest writer America has produced.
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