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Dismembering the American Dream: The Life and Fiction of Richard Yates
Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature
Since his death in Alabama in 1992, the work of American writer Richard Yates has enjoyed a renaissance, culminating in director Sam Mendes’s adaption of the novel Revolutionary Road (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet). Dismembering the American Dream is the first book-length critical study of Yates’s fiction.
Kate Charlton-Jones argues that to read Yates’s tales of disordered lives is to uncover not misery, though the lives he describes are sad ones, but a profound, enriching, and humorous understanding of human weakness and vulnerability. Yates’s narratives absorb his readers so entirely, mirroring their own emotional highs and lows with such skill, that reading becomes recognition. Yates demonstrates his ability to tease powerful human drama out of the most ordinary, quotidian moments. At the same time, Yates’s fiction displays an object lesson in the art of fine prose writing, so it is no surprise that many early fans of Yates were also established writers.
Charlton-Jones explores how Yates extends the realist form and investigates three main recurring themes of his observations about performative behavior, which are at the heart of all his fictions; his conception of the writer’s role in society; and how he envisages the development of social and sexual relationships. Furthermore, Charlton-Jones illustrates how Yates incorporates some of the concerns and methods of postmodernist writers but how, nevertheless, he resists their ontological challenges.
Drawing on the author’s personal papers and with a foreword by DeWitt Henry and an afterword by Richard Yates’s daughter Monica, Dismembering the American Dream provides an extended critical examination of the often neglected but important work of this gifted and accomplished author.
Since his death in Alabama in 1992, the work of American writer Richard Yates has enjoyed a renaissance, culminating in director Sam Mendes’s adaption of the novel Revolutionary Road (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet). Dismembering the American Dream is the first book-length critical study of Yates’s fiction.
Kate Charlton-Jones argues that to read Yates’s tales of disordered lives is to uncover not misery, though the lives he describes are sad ones, but a profound, enriching, and humorous understanding of human weakness and vulnerability. Yates’s narratives absorb his readers so entirely, mirroring their own emotional highs and lows with such skill, that reading becomes recognition. Yates demonstrates his ability to tease powerful human drama out of the most ordinary, quotidian moments. At the same time, Yates’s fiction displays an object lesson in the art of fine prose writing, so it is no surprise that many early fans of Yates were also established writers.
Charlton-Jones explores how Yates extends the realist form and investigates three main recurring themes of his observations about performative behavior, which are at the heart of all his fictions; his conception of the writer’s role in society; and how he envisages the development of social and sexual relationships. Furthermore, Charlton-Jones illustrates how Yates incorporates some of the concerns and methods of postmodernist writers but how, nevertheless, he resists their ontological challenges.
Drawing on the author’s personal papers and with a foreword by DeWitt Henry and an afterword by Richard Yates’s daughter Monica, Dismembering the American Dream provides an extended critical examination of the often neglected but important work of this gifted and accomplished author.
296 pages, Paperback
First published July 30, 2014
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November 6, 2025
What is it to read Yates's tales of disordered lives? To quote Kate Charlton-Jones, it is "to uncover not misery (though the lives he describes are sad and profoundly lonely), but an insightful, enriching and often humorous understanding of human weakness and vulnerability".
This volume is an interesting, mostly author-centred analysis of Yates's work, covering diverse themes in the fiction ranging from Yates and Hollywood to the postwar years/Age of Anxiety, with emphasis on self-delusion, superficiality in relationships, performative language and behaviour in every aspect of life, as well as the centrality of marriage and rigid gender roles to life in the fifties and sixties.
Instead of seeing Yates's fiction as depressing, Charlton-Jones emphasises this underappreciated author's unique power of observation at a time when realism was considered passé, the "sensibilities of a man who found much in the human condition that disturbed and alienated him". Charlton-Jones uncovers in Yates's works a writer of deep compassion, a man who saw and chronicled the difficulties faced by the men and women who were sold the shiny things of the postwar American Dream and were left unfulfilled by their promises.
In this collection of critical essays Charlton-Jones's appreciation and close reading of this great writer shines through.
This volume is an interesting, mostly author-centred analysis of Yates's work, covering diverse themes in the fiction ranging from Yates and Hollywood to the postwar years/Age of Anxiety, with emphasis on self-delusion, superficiality in relationships, performative language and behaviour in every aspect of life, as well as the centrality of marriage and rigid gender roles to life in the fifties and sixties.
Instead of seeing Yates's fiction as depressing, Charlton-Jones emphasises this underappreciated author's unique power of observation at a time when realism was considered passé, the "sensibilities of a man who found much in the human condition that disturbed and alienated him". Charlton-Jones uncovers in Yates's works a writer of deep compassion, a man who saw and chronicled the difficulties faced by the men and women who were sold the shiny things of the postwar American Dream and were left unfulfilled by their promises.
In this collection of critical essays Charlton-Jones's appreciation and close reading of this great writer shines through.
Displaying 1 of 1 review