The Collected Stories

by Richard Yates, Richard Russo (Introduction)

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic pretensions, Yates ruthlessly examines the hopes and disappointments of ordinary people with empathy and humour.

Contents:

Doctor Jack-o'-Lantern --
The best of everything --
Jody rolled the bones --
No pain whatsoever --
A glutton for punishment --
A wrestler with sharks --
Fun with a stranger --
The B.A.R. man --
A really good jazz piano --
Out with the old --
Builders --
Oh, Joseph, I'm so tired --
A natural girl --
Trying out for the race --
Liars in love --
A compassionate leave --
Regards at home --
Saying goodbye to Sally --
The canal --
A clinical romance --
Bells in the morning --
Evening on the Cote d'Azur --
Thieves --
A private possession --
The comptroller and the wild wind --
A last fling, like --
A convalescent ego.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Literature, Literary Fiction, American, 20th Century

496 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2001

About the author

Richard Yates shone bright upon the publication of his first novel, Revolutionary Road, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. It drew unbridled praise and branded Yates an important, new writer. Kurt Vonnegut claimed that Revolutionary Road was The Great Gatsby of his time. William Styron described it as "A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic." Tennessee Williams went one further and said, "Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is."

In 1962 Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published, his first collection of short stories. It too had praise heaped upon it. Kurt Vonnegut said it was "the best short-story collection ever written by an American."

Yates' writing skills were further utilized when, upon returning from Los Angeles, he began working as a speechwriter for then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy until the assassination of JFK. From there he moved onto Iowa where, as a creative writing teacher, he would influence and inspire writers such as Andre Dubus and Dewitt Henry.

His third novel, Disturbing the Peace, was published in 1975. Perhaps his second most well-known novel, The Easter Parade, was published in 1976. The story follows the lives of the Grimes sisters and ends in typical Yatesian fashion, replicating the disappointed lives of Revolutionary Road.

However, Yates began to find himself as a writer cut adrift in a sea fast turning towards postmodernism; yet, he would stay true to realism. His heroes and influences remained the classics of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flaubert and short-story master, Chekov.

It was to his school and army days that Richard turned to for his next novel, A Good School, which was quickly followed by his second collection of short stories, Liars in Love. Young Hearts Crying emerged in 1984 followed two years later with Cold Spring Harbour, which would prove to be his final completed novel.

Like the fate of his hero, Flaubert, whose novel Madame Bovary influenced Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, Richard Yates' works are enjoying a posthumous renaissance, attracting newly devoted fans across the Atlantic and beyond.

Reviews

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a 2012 review!

“The Collected Stories of Richard Yates”—A staggering and wonderful story collection about what it means to be human in postwar 1950s suburbia and beyond.

The first segment, selections from Yates’s “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness" are the highlights. His stories are cleanly written, without any pretenses, and quite honestly unflinching about the human condition’s desire to be happy; though unhappiness and misery are always going to be in existence.

His characters from the “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness” selections are human, and often remind you of loveable losers or people you might have met somewhere that are often portrayed as sad sack, lonely individuals who make us look away; yet, Mr. Yates forces us to peer into their lives.

Notable selections so far include “Dr. Jack O’Lantern”, the first story, about Vinny, an inner-city orphan who is temporarily assigned to attend public school at a suburban neighborhood in Westchester County. Vinny’s attempt to mask his Brooklyn accent and social awkwardness by attempting to tell his classmates during a show and tell session that he saw a film version of “Jekyll and Hyde” by saying “Jack O’ Lantern and Mr. Hyde” turns out to be a brutal session in which leads him to being bullied by two classmates who clearly do not appreciate him at their school. Their teacher, Miss Price is a reminder of teachers we once had who often looked away and ignored their social responsibilities for all students, out of their own shame and biased notions about their own prejudices. She’s not very nice. She’s quite condescending.

“Fun With A Stranger” is also about another teacher—the strict and crusty Miss Snell who is hated and feared by her students and her attempt to show them a little levity by buying them Christmas erasers as Christmas gift. Unfortunately, her students realize she has done this out of her own social awkwardness, and realize it is her own inability to relate to her kids is why she is so hated.

“A Really Good Jazz Piano” is the masterpiece of the segment. It’s about two friends, handsome Carson, and hairy and fat loser Ken. They’re both American expatriates wandering about in Italy, and Carson is a playboy: wealthy and sexy and all women are attracted to his swagger. Ken is fat, smelly, and can’t find a girlfriend. He also is studying purposely at the Sorbonne so he can stay in Europe longer to spend time with Carson.

Yates explains to us that it is a matter of luck and of birth as to how some individuals are luckier than others; while some individuals in society have it more difficult than others, especially African-Americans of the time.

Ken and Carson encounter their friend, Sid a jazz pianist at a cabaret. Educated and talented, Carson becomes enraged when he notices Sid attempting to get a Vegas booking with a producer by pandering to him in “black colloquialism”…however, he doesn’t realize that because of the segregated 1950s, Sid still has to pander.

If you are a fan of Updike, Oates, Cheever, Chekhov: This is a fantastic and bleak collection at the same time.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book kicked my ass. I was reading it while it was cold, and several of the stories use cold as part of the feeling, and I was reading it during some serious emotional turmoil, and much of the book deals with emotional turmoil, but usually subdued, quiet turmoil, boiling beneath the surface and coming out in the stupid little ways it usually does in real life. This guy knew how to capture the embarrassing feelings of futility and shame and hyper self-awareness that I'm scared of and hate feeling. But I couldn't stop. It was so good. Sometimes I could only read 5 pages at a time because it was too close to home.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yates makes my soul weep.

[Andrew]

Richard Yates was a man of my Dad's generation, a group of anxious men too young to qualify for the Greatest Generation and too old to be hippies. And damn could he write about that generation. Yates' world is full of rich, humane portraits of whole classes of people I've never met, drunk World War II vets and blue collar Jersey housewives in the '40s and Depression-era New York street kids.

And yet, unlike his contemporary Updike, Yates was never a flashy writer. His turns of phrase aren't especially witty and I don't find myself reeling at his technique. Instead, he just relied on a remarkable ear for dialogue and a deep feeling for the unexpressed desires of the people around him, a little like the sort of thing Cassavetes was doing in his films a little later.

There are a great many recurring elements in Yates' stories... not like motifs, more like just recycled ideas. You feel like he only had so many stories in him, and he had to borrow from his other stories from time to time. In a less talented writer this would be a dealbreaker, but with this man, it's just a minor annoyance.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This contains all stories from Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love (both of which I reviewed), so reading most of them again, plus the other nine uncollected stories that make up this collection, all I'll add to what I've already said about Yates, is that he is so criminally overlooked when we're talking about the greats of American literature. Most readers might only know him for the novel Revolutionary Road (that in itself a great work), but he was a better writer of short fiction, in my opinion. Put it this way, this book kicks anything I've read by the likes of Hemingway, Salinger or Cheever into the dust, and is on par with the best of Carver. Yes, that's how high I rate Richard Yates. Yes, he is that good.

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I identify so deeply with the writing of Richard Yates and am ashamed to just now read his collected stories. Sure, I've read many of them in anthologies and of course Easter Parade and Revolutionary Road. To read the stories is to admit that Yates drew the bulk of his material from his life experience: World War II, tuberculosis, Hollywood screenwriting, failed marriages, and a dash of current events.

"Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" remains one of my favorite stories of all time with it's frustrated sculptor mother whose pride causes her to say hateful things and embarrass her children who hold fast to their sense of imagination for hope.

"Saying Goodbye to Sally" is an homage to Yates time in Hollywood. He compares his adventures to those of F. Scott Fitzgerald (fun for Fitzgerald nuts like me). From his salty-hut of a writing studio by Malibu beach to the drama of Beverly Hills and the glamour of expensive hotel-bar cocktails after a day of work, he makes me miss LA only I know that it is his LA and not a shade close to the one I had.

The collection has a wonderful introduction by Richard Russo, a writer clearly inspired by Yates. In the introduction, Russo recalls that his former student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, John McNally, collected used copies of Yates books so that he could hand them to anyone who hadn't discovered what a terrific writer he was yet. I find this charming and funny as Yates is brilliant but certainly not for everyone. His greatest gifts are his keen observation and his ability to humiliate his characters. He will not look away from a character's worst suffering. And, the suffering is almost always sourced from loneliness and the variant directions of trouble that one feeling can push us towards.

And little did I know until now, that Yates died not too far from me in Alabama when I was ten-years-old. He'd been teaching while in poor health at the University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa. I like to imagine that all those childhood trips to see Bama games in Tuscaloosa also held the sight of an aged Richard Yates passing me by. I doubt it but it's a nice thought. One last anecdote before quotes is that in college my mom took an active interest in what I was reading. She put down her pot boilers and was floored by books like The Bell Jar and stories by Harold Brodkey. Sylvia Plath considered her book a pot boiler and while it may be overly modified for my now MFA-critic self, it still holds a dear place for me. I doubt my mom admitted her new favorite reading to her P.T.A friends (she was the President) but it's remarkable how many women of her time looked for mystery novels less out of their craving for the macabre but their fear of how nuanced realism would make them feel. I have friends to this day that I'm sure my writing and others writing depresses. I can't imagine not being able to witness. I didn't realize until a bit after the time of my mom's reading my library that she wasn't just trying to be a friend to me but she was truly marveling over what she had missed by denying her own curiosities for fear of being defined by them.

Below are favorite quotes culled from "The Collected Stories" but there are so many more I would have shared were it not for space and not boring you:

"She never seemed to lose her temper, but it would almost have been better if she did, for it was the flat, dry, passionless redundancies of her scolding that got everybody down."
From "Fun with a Stranger"

I love his sense of self deprecation here -
"Writers who write about writers can easily bring on the worst kind of literary miscarriage; everybody knows that. Start a story off with "Craig crushed out his cigarette and lunged for the typewriter," and there isn't an editor in the United States who'll feel like reading your next sentence. So don't worry: this is going to be a straight, no-nonsense piece of fiction about a cabdriver, a movie star, and an eminent child psychologist, and that's a promise. But you'll have to be patient for a minute, because there's going to be a writer in it too. I won't call him "Craig," and I can guarantee that he won't get away with being the only Sensitive Person among the characters, but we're going to be stuck with him right along and you'd better count on his being as awkward and obtrusive as writers nearly always are, in fiction or in life."
From "Builders"

Edith talking about the sound of NYC -
"I don't mean just the loud noises," she said, "like the siren going by just now, or those car doors slamming, or all the laughing and shouting down the street; that's just close-up stuff. I'm talking about something else. Because you see there are millions and millions of people in New York--more people than you can possibly imagine, ever--and most of them are doing something that makes sound. Maybe talking, or playing the radio, maybe closing doors, maybe putting their forks down on their plates if they're having dinner, or dropping their shoes if they're going to bed--and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it's so faint--so very, very faint--that you can't hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time."
And referenced again in the last sentence -
"We would probably never see Bart again--or if we ever did, he would probably not want to see us. But out mother was ours: we were hers; and we lived with that knowledge as we lay listening for the faint, faint sound of millions."
From "Oh, Joseph, I"m So Tired." That last sentence will always make me gasp!

"She was a handsome woman, blond, sturdy, and still young, with a full-throated laugh for anything she found absurd, and this wasn't the life she had planned for herself at all."
From "Trying Out for the Race"

"It often seemed to Elizabeth that the best part of the day was when she was alone at last, curled up on the sofa with a drink, with her spike-heeled shoes cast off and tumbled on the carpet. Perhaps a sense of well-earned peace like this was the best part of life itself, the part that made all the rest endurable. But she had always tried to know enough not to kid herself--self-deception was an illness--and so after a couple of drinks she was willing to acknowledge the real nature of those evenings alone: she was waiting for the telephone to ring."
From "Trying Out for the Race"

"I loved the girl who'd wanted to tell me all about "the theater," and the girl who'd stood calm and shy in the thunderclap of applause that followed her scene from Dream Girl. I didn't much like the dependable typist at Botany Mills, or the grudging potato peeler, or the slow, tired woman who frowned over the ironing board to prove how poor we were. And I didn't want to be married to anyone, ever, who said things like, "Oh, you can take care of what?"
From "Regards at Home"

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not know Richard Yates before finding this book in a bookseller in Provence. This short novels are a true happiness. Mad Men athmosphere with frigid blonde women and neurotic men.
It is perfectly written. For a lover of American literature it is the missing link between Tennessee William and Raymond Carver. A true discovery.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yates wrote many excellent stories: ‘Liars in Love', 'Builders', 'Oh Joseph, I'm So Tired’. This isn't an excellent book. I wish publishers would stop putting out a 'collected' where a ‘selected' would be better.

[María Jesús · Rating 5 out of 5]

These short stories read as distilled drops of everyday life, where common ocurrences are polished to their true meaning. Yates registers those minor events with a perceptive eye and his masterful use of language rings true.

[Bojan Gačić · Rating 4 out of 5]

The short comment only regards ''The Uncollected Stories''

Returning to Yates is both pleasure and a privilege. A collection of nine stories, discovered at James Madison University, bears no novelties, but reaffirm why we enjoy the painful exactness of his prose. As the most stifled and hidden American novelist he further establishes himself as a supreme chronicler of human disappointment.

[Angela Meyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Adapted from a 2010 review on my blog http://literaryminded.com.au

When a man is fired from his job in the story ‘A Glutton for Punishment’, he realises he has enjoyed the failures in his life. The character in this – like many of the other characters in Richard Yates’ Collected Stories – runs over a conversation in his head, with his wife, before the actual conversation takes place. Reading this book is having a conversation with failure – your own projected shortcomings (gone over in your head), the misfires of your past, and the failures of everybody around you (including those who fail to perceive said failures).

Yates is often called a ‘depressing’ writer, but most of these stories are as equally humorous as they are sad. ‘The Best of Everything’ is about a couple on the day before they wed. Revealed to the reader are their niggling doubts – all the things we know will become stalwart issues in their marriage, itches turning to reddened sores – such as the way the man says ‘terlet’ for toilet; the way he needs his mates; and the way he doesn’t notice her new negligee. It’s humorous because anyone who has been in any kind of romantic relationship will recognise the compromises, and will smile at their depiction. It’s sad for much the same reason – because these unfortunate perceptions ring true.

Another joy of these stories is Yates’ charming, unencumbered (very American) prose. Unlike a work like The Catcher in the Rye, the language doesn’t feel dated, here, but drags you back a few decades while simultaneously making you realise how much is the same (in intimate human relationships). Even Yates’ later stories (none are actually dated here, which is a tad annoying) have this element of ‘politeness’ – a façade of ‘getting along’ when there is oh so much bubbling beneath the surface. Many of the characters do seem resolved to their fates, despite moments of piercing aloneness, such as the characters in the tuberculosis ward in ‘No Pain Whatsoever’; or Ken, in ‘A Really Good Jazz Piano’ – who accepts the fact he is perpetually over-eager and physically awkward.

There are a couple of stories set in the TB ward. Yates himself spent time in one after the war. Other settings include domestic spaces, offices, military training facilities and war zones (though combat is not explored). The stories are set mainly in the state of New York – the city and its affluent suburbs; London; and LA. The LA story ‘Saying Goodbye to Sally’ is another one of my favourites, and all because of this:

‘By the time Jack had taken to drinking heavily and not writing much – not even doing much of the anonymous, badly paid hackwork that had provided his income for years, though he still managed to do enough of that to meet alimony payments – and he had begun to see himself, not without a certain literary satisfaction, as a tragic figure.

‘His two small daughters frequently came in from the country to spend weekends with him, always wearing fresh, bright clothes that were quick to wilt and get dirty in the damp and grime of his terrible home, and one day the younger girl announced in tears that she wouldn’t take showers there anymore because of the cockroaches in the shower stall. At last, after he’d swatted and flushed away every cockroach in sight, and after a lot of coaxing, she said she guessed it would be okay if she kept her eyes shut – and the thought of her standing blind in there behind the mildewed plastic curtain, hurrying, trying not to shift her feet near the treacherously swarming drain as she soaped and rinsed herself, made him weak with remorse.’

Some of the stories are from the point of view of children, such as ‘Doctor Jack-O-Lantern’, where a disadvantaged, lonely new kid, Vinny, both seeks and pushes away the care his teacher bestows upon him. Her caring is so alien and difficult for him it causes him to act out. It’s incredibly moving (as most of them are) and so skillfully rendered – you’re right there in the microcosm of this classroom with its smells, strange intimacies and dangers.

In fact, one of Yates’ biggest strengths is the way he gets you in so close to the characters – so close you can hear their thoughts and plans and see their hearts ticking – yet simultaneously at a distance so that you may see how they are perceived by others. Yates suggests both compassion and pity through this kind of writing – and not just for the characters on the page, but for the person sitting next to you, and even for your own stupid, small (and often joyous) existence.

I love this book. I have talked about it to everyone as I’ve been reading it. I found all my friends in it. I found myself, uncomfortably, romantically, sadly, truthfully, in it.

Sally says to Jack in ‘Saying Goodbye to Sally’: ‘Why don’t you just come over here so we can sort of fall all over each other.’

It’s a book to sort of fall all over… again and again.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best of these stories - and many of them are wonderful - ring painfully, awkwardly, authentically true. Yates was a master of dialogue and an uncanny observer of the fragility of the human ego. I only have 3 books left in his oeuvre to read and that sort of makes me sad, but I also have Blake Bailey's big fat Yates biography on hand to plow through afterward. So that gives me comfort. At any rate, this collection gathers both of Yates' books of short stories (Eleven Kinds of Loneliness & Liars in Love) along with 9 previously unpublished tales, and features a lovely, thoughtful introduction by novelist Richard Russo. It is a must-read for fans of the short story form, 5 stars.

[Melting Uncle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked the Liars in Love stories the most
followed by the uncollected stories that appeared at the end ("Evening on the Cote d'Azur" stands out)
and I was surprised to find I enjoyed the Eleven Kinds of Loneliness stories the least.

I've not seen this mentioned anywhere but I find the way Richard Yates writes dialogue hilarious, especially in the 70's and 80's with lots of characters calling each other "baby" and whatnot. There's also something about the way his narrative voice encounters the emerging youth culture of that time that I find so funny. Bewildered old man reckoning with the tides of change.

Not every story is amazing but in the end I felt connected to the storyteller. I'd like to eventually read all his other books.

[Miriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hope Richard Yates and Dorothy Parker got to have a good drink together.

I enjoyed these bitter little offerings. Lots of tuberculosis hospitals, war stories, and urban professionals and dissatisfied wives. The characters are well-drawn and vivid, the dialogue feels real, and I feel like I understand. These characters are horrible and human. They're petty and shallow and ambitious and sad and complicated and hurting and hopeful and messy inside. But the whole thing comes off beautifully precise. He hates people but they're all the people we're going to get. Might as well get to know them.

"The Comptroller and the Wild Wind" resonated with me right around now: grabbing a woman to reassert damaged masculinity. It's carefully written and sympathetic to her perspective. It's not OK, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. At least he holds up a mirror to that type of entitlement and grasping for meaning and expecting a woman to supply it. There's lots to dig through here.

[Laudan · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best short story collections I’ve ever read. Almost every single one of these stories is full of human sadness and many forms of loneliness but they are exquisitely written because Richard Yates is such a gifted storyteller. Just as his acclaimed novel Revolutionary Road was adapted into a film, many of the stories in this collection felt like they could easily be adapted for the big screen. These stories leave a lasting impression, sometimes they seemed to end abruptly, and I found myself wanting more but ultimately I think they are meant to be just as they are.
There isn’t a single dud here, however, some stories are just a bit more compelling and put a deeper twinge in your heart while you’re reading. Highly recommended for the thoughtful readers out there.

[Stephen Curran · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first time I’ve read anything by Richard Yates since I finished Blake Bailey’s astonishing biography of the author, and I’m amazed anew at how such a chaotic life could produce such balanced and beautiful pieces of fiction. The first two books collected here - ‘Eleven Kinds of Loneliness’ and ‘Liars in Love’ - are perfectly crafted and get better and with each reread. The uncollected works that make up the final third are slightly less successful, ending occasionally with flourishes that seem too authorly and contrived, but they're still more compelling than the work of most other writers. What a shame that he couldn't produce more.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was interesting to observe the differences between the three sections of this collection-- the stories from Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, from Liars in Love, and those uncollected. The stories from Eleven Kinds were the most entertaining, I thought. Even though they are possessed still of that incisive understanding of misery, the characters are often hapless or romantic enough to still be pitifully likable. The Best of Everything, No Pain Whatsoever, and Builders stood out most for me. Liars In Love, the twenty-years-later follow-up, is so much more dramatically bleak. The stories are long, and sometimes they felt overstuffed to me, even if they are vivid and well detailed. Oh, Joseph, particularly suffers for this, especially seeing how many similarities it has with The Easter Parade (though of course, that's likely owed to their shared similarity to his life). A Natural Girl, however, balances it right out, moving convincingly over years of time and ultimately completing an unexpected circuit. The title story and Saying Goodbye to Sally are the longest stories, but also the tightest, using their time to layout a rich, developed narrative with similar "out-of-place guy falls in with strange locals" premises. The uncollected stories are less tight, suffering, I suspect, from not having been edited very well. With the exception of Evening on the Cote d'Azur and A Private Possession, most all of them were hard for me to keep my mind on. A Convalescent Ego has a lot going for it, but its ending feels out of place. Maybe I missed something and it is one of the main characters fantasies, but I don't think I did.

[Thomas Mason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a book that you “finish” because it is a collection of stories. It’s something you come back to every so often. It’s hard to give this a review but I really did enjoy reading a lot of these stories. They are 10–15 pages max. Takes place in New York predominantly and they are stories of every-day working Americans and the harshness of life. I resonated with a lot of these stories because the author does a great job of delving into the mind of the average person. Most of these stories have a “sad” ending so it’s hard to continue to read them over and over again because rather than there be a definitive start, build up, climax and conclusion you see in most novels, it is a bunch of smaller stories.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Logging this separately from the two individually published collections (Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love) that are included in here, because I need those uncollected stories represented!

Really liked this collection overall, but the uncollected stories really did stand out by themselves and it's a shame almost all of them were never published in their own right. I can't wait to continue my journey through Yates's bibliography because the man could really really write.

[Liam O'Toole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many short stories make for a long book. I think I enjoyed the unpublished collection the best.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is some fantastic writing here, complex stories, subtle touches, and very intelligent writing. But it can be a bit of a slog at times – not due to poor quality, but because of the sad, painful nature of most of Yates’s stories. The author was a bipolar alcoholic who smoked 5 packs a day, yet somehow managed to live to around 70. He was twice divorced, and he probably was deeply familiar with the emotional dislocation and personal struggles that he writes about in his stories. A sour brew at times, but a good one, even if it leaves the reader without a sense of renewed faith.

The losers he wrote about were primarily middle class New York men, men who were fighting losing battles in the workplace and on the home front, caught in failing relationships, and looking to the bottle and some improbable dreams to carry them thru. There are also a couple of stories that focus on lonely boys (such as the superb “Doctor Jack-o-Lantern”, about a young Brooklynite sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the suburbs). Although the women in these stories often come across as bitchy and capricious, they also appear full and complex. “Evening on the Cote d’Azur” is a painfully believable tale of a lonely, adulterous wife and her arrogrant prick of a seducer, and is practically a work of feminism.

Yates took a hard look at people on the margins of respectability – such as floundering artists. In “Joseph, I’m So Tired” a boy deals with his mother’s flaky, artistic way of life, and in “Builders” a deluded cab driver spends his hard-earned pay hiring a young, cynical writer to help him write some corny stories focusing on a tough but warm-hearted cabbie. In “A Really Good Jazz Piano” a couple of rich young (white) wastrels, drinking their way thru Europe, come across an Afro-American jazzman and humiliate him because he has the gall to try and promote his career. That one really had some teeth. Several stories focus on life in a tuberculosis ward – Yates apparently had a bout with TB but came thru all right – and these can be both moving and depressing, as grown men fight to have a little fun and maintain a little respectability as they deal with the formerly deadly disease.

There are stories from two books here: all of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, an excellent collection, seven from Liars in Love (not as impressive) and nine uncollected pieces. Here are a few more that I liked: “The Best of Everything”, about a young working class couple who are about to get married, yet neither of them has any real maturity – the guy still wants to hang out with his buddies, and the girl has silly, romantic ideals. “Jody Rolled the Bones” centering on a tough, cold, but ultimately decent drill sergeant. His devotion to duty ultimately intimidates the lieutenant above him, who sends him packing. “Regards at Home” is about a young guy who is struggling with his wife and with general dissatisfaction. He comes across a friend who, as it turns out, is far more unhappy than he is, and admires him a great deal.

Yates was an artist who saw the weaknesses in our relationships and workplaces and hearts, saw the loneliness and unhappiness, and built these observations into some interesting stories. While I enjoyed reading them, it would be with a little trepidation that I would pick up a Yates book again (although I do want to read Revolution Road) because I know I would step into a sad world that very closely resembles our own. If these are not cautionary tales, and they do not appear to be, then Yates is primarily a brilliant pessimist, pointing out the irreparable flaws of life in this world. Nonetheless, his best stories are honest and moving.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

In reading the introduction it becomes obvious that perhaps Yates is one of those writers who has mistakenly been forgotten. Certainly when “ Revolutionary Road “ was made into a star laden movie his name appeared to a generation or two who had never known, or had forgotten, his writing existed.

This collection of short stories begins with “ Doctor Jack O Lantern “. A young Italian orphan from New York City has been fostered to an older couple in the suburbs. Despite her best efforts his grade school teacher struggles to help him acclimate. His tendency to lie and exaggerate harm his efforts with the kids, his knowledge of dirty words with the teacher

“ Jody Rolled the Bones “ is narrated by a city kid who with many other city kids is sent to basic training in 1944. Assigned a southern hard add drill
Sargent they move from hate to respect and back again

“ No Pain Whatsoever “ A woman is visiting her husband at the TB Ward where he has lived for years. She is driven there by a work friend and her husband as well as her current lover. She is conflicted

“ A Glutton For Punishment “ follows a moderately unsuccessful man as he recounts his easy capacity for failure as he recounts how he has come to expect it so much it becomes self fulfilling

“ A Wrestler With Sharks “ follows the going’s on at a third rate union trade magazine.

“ Fun With A Stranger “ is narrated by a young boy describing the tension between the students in third grade. One class is taught by a young, pretty, happy, generous teacher while the other is led by a dour, severe, woman near retirement or worse.

The BAR Man : more than a decade after World War Two an ex army man is working in an office, married to a mousy woman who can’t have children due to a tipped uterus. When she protests his one night out with the boys it is a tipping point

“ A Really Good Jazz Piano “ a couple of young American men trying to live the good life in Paris have to come to grips with what they are really doing with their lives

“ Out With the Old “ is the second story dealing with patients at a tuberculosis hospital. I think this shows how much of a toll the sickness took on wide swaths of people. It also makes me wonder about the personal experience of Yates. In this story we see many patients in a ward and how they interact both with each other and their families. A very strong story

“ Builders “ is a long story about a young man who works writing for a low level trade paper and envisions himself as the next Hemingway. He takes a job ghostwriting stories for a friendly, salt of the earth cabbie. They both have more dreams than prospects

“ Oh Joseph, I’m So Tired “ is an odd, lengthy, story that has a man telling a story from his boyhood. He, seven, living with his older sister and Mother in the months after FDR was elected. She gets commissioned to do a small bust of the President but that’s only the beginning

“ A Natural Girl “ Story follows the middle girl in a group of seven, her Father’s favorite, in the years between college and marriage. She marries her professor and breaks her Fathers heart with a declaration she does not love him anymore. Ten years later she tells the same to her husband. In both cases she offers no explanation, explaining that you either love it you don’t. This story also offers a good picture of a middle aged man in the typical crisis. Leaving wife and kids and just infatuated with the youth of a new young lover

“ Trying Out For the Race “ follows two divorced in the thirties who decide to set up housekeeping together with their kids and share expenses. But, the women are quite different as are their children leading to conflict

“ Liars in Love “ Long, almost novella length, title story from one of the authors earlier collections. An American couple is in London, he has gained a Fulbright scholarship and, while thrilled to gain it, feels a bit awkward over appearing idle. His wife is not happy and takes the baby and returns to the states saying she needs to consider the relationship. Once gone he begins trying to go out, rather unsuccessfully, until he meets up with a prostitute who quickly begins a non paying relationship with him. The woman has lots of fibs though, about her upbringing, her baby’s parentage and more and he soon realizes his mistake. Eventually he has to be harsh with the woman and at the same time receives a letter from his wife asking him to come home so they can begin again.

In “ Compassionate Leave “ we follow a young American soldier serving in France just after the end of World War Two. Resettling refugees, routing returning soldiers its what his squad is assigned. He asks for and receives a short leave to visit his Mother and sister in London. He has not seen them since he was a boy and his parents divorced in America and split the children. The dinner with his Mother is awkward and while he is glad to see his sister, and she him, she gently mocks him for his innocence of the world and women. This hurts him as he has been trying valiantly to work up the courage to lose his virginity, if only with a prostitute

“ Regards At Home” follows a young man who marries young and comes to regret it. It is only thru the eyes of a friend who is jealous of his success
that he comes to realize his own good fortune.

“ Saying Goodbye to Sally” follows Jack, a divorced Easterner living in a roach infested apartment. Dreaming of being a writer nothing good is happening and he is mortified when his young daughters visit him in his terrible apartment. When luck strikes and he is hired to write a screenplay in Hollywood he heads west for a three month assignment. This long story documents his west coast adventures including a romance with Sally, a prematurely gray secretary in her thirties who lives in a wonderful house with a wealthy widow. A homage , and not a discreet one , to Fitzgerald this story is interesting but not much more.

Now we come to those stories that were never published in a collection previously. Honestly I found a couple of these to be among the best in the whole set.

In “ The Canal “ two married couples are having dinner and, as we learn it does inevitably , the conversation turns to stories from there time in Europe in World War Two. The quieter of the two men’s wife makes a big deal of the more exciting, bravery laden stories of the other man. Little does she know her husbands quietness about his experience is because it was a time he wants to forget. Later after they leave she rebukes him for letting other men gain the spotlight in these reminisces.

“ A Clinical Romance “ is yet another story about men in a tuberculosis ward. The author seems to have spent a great deal of time on this subject.

“ Bells In the Morning “ is a very good, quite short story about two soldiers sharing a foxhole in Europe, April, 1945. One morning the lines are quiet as they drink coffee and watch the sky lighten. Then they hear church bells coming from the nearest town. It comes to them that perhaps this is the moment, maybe the war is over. They get very excited....until it comes to one of them that it is Easter Sunday.

In “ Evenings on the Côte d’Azur we meet a young married Navy wife who has allowed her husband to persuade her to take herself and the kids with him to Marseilles where he is stationed. He had promised sun and warm beaches and that much is true. But, he is on ship much of the time, the French do not like the Americans and she has to keep the kids happy. One night another navy wife convinces her to go to an American themed bar for a drink. She ends up sleeping with an American serviceman who charms her but, who we see when he returns to the bar later jokes about what an easy mark she was.

“ Thieves “ follows men in a TB hospital again. This time we follow a groups nightly bull stories where each knows the other is, if not lying, exaggerating famously, but they still try to do each other.

“ A Private Possession “ is a fantastic but horrifically sad story. A young girl and her brother are being cared for by an older Aunt. The girl struggles to make friends and do well in school while the brother is better adjusted. When the girl finds a fifty cent piece on the school hard and keeps it it leads to a series of events with further diminishes her relationships both at home and in school

“ The Comptroller and the Wild Wind “ is another fantastic story, albeit another very sad one. George Pollack is the comptroller at the American Bearing Company. His wife had surprised him recently when he came home from work with her packed and getting ready to leave him. He, at fifty, finds himself cuckholded and his wife heading west with another man. On the day of the story he finds out just what one of his assistants who he had allowed himself to think he might be a mentor thinks of him as well as making a fool of himself in pursuit of a young waitress at the restaurant he often eats breakfast at.

“ A Last Fling, Like “ is written as a long letter from a young woman detailing her long planned and saved for European trip. She is engaged to be married on her return but, since her plans for the trip long predated the relationship, she had told her future husband when he proposed that it was a trio she would still take

“ A Convalescent Ego “ is the story of a man, home from some sort of long illness ( perhaps a stay in a tb ward) who is suffering with his wife. She feels pressure from their lessened financial straits and extra work load. He feels ill and guilty. The story ends in a bit of wish fulfillment from the male e d if the story as the wife eventually apologizes to the husband for not being patient and caring enough. This is not the usual ending of his stories. One wonders if he just wanted to see whAt that would feel like to write.

I would say after reading this collection that while these stories have merit they have not, in general, aged that well and are certainly not what I would call part of the canon of best twentieth century stories.

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Doctor Jack-o'-Lanter": 8
- Hurt people hurt people. Ever hear that? A good one right? Yeah, I made it up. Here Yates explores the way in which one pain begets another, and how the most vulnerable are those right in front of you. STORY: new kid in school, foster Italian kid from nyc and now in suburbia, tries to fit in, fails, and instead takes out his anger on his compassionate teacher, even if she’d only tried to help. But, don’t we all have contempt for those to whom we are indebted.

"The Best of Everything": 8.25
- It’s not his fault. Richard Yates doesn’t need to account for the fact that Matt Weiner stole his aesthetic. That our image of the period and its relations and privations are so etched as to make Yates in-its-time pieces seem more carbon copy than blueprint. Yet it’s happened nonetheless—for this is the most redolent of all of the MM aesthetic. That time frame, however, is significant for understanding / interpreting the sexual mishap at the end — for reading the great disheartening pain in Grace’s sexual rejection , rather than the happen-stancial near miss of a buffoon that we might now mistake it for. In short, she’s hung out to dry and one guess is as good as another as to her likelihood of being at that wedding. STORY: Grace, secretary at NY firm, set to marry Ralph, well-meaning bore with small prospects. She’s not sure, but she’s also not smart enough to realize this. More importantly, she’s willing to make a go. He, on the other hand, loves his friends — in that sad way men often do. They gonna make it? Who knows. It’s otherwise trademark Yates. The distant emotionality, the inordinately perceptive female character work, and the insight into a certain type of male obliviousness. It’s pretty good.

"Jody Roll Them Bones": 7.5
- In which Yates is cancelled for writing a loving portrait of someone who can’t pronounce people’s strange names correctly, except he’s white and they’re white ... Hmm, I’d assumed that Yates would, naturally, shine in the short form as effortlessly as in the long; but, in retrospect I realize that’s an unfounded assumption. It could change, sure, but there’s really no reason to assume that the particular things that make his long form stuff so satisfying should at all transfer to short fiction, or that it’s actually impossible for them too, that they need the breathing room to stretch and sing and dig those uncaring tendrils into you ... what do we have here? A story or a tale? The story is, for all intents and purposes — and no matter the half century between them or the racial and socio-political chasms separating them — basically formed of the same stuff as Junot Diaz’s NILDA: nostalgia and Sehnsucht disguised as hardened narrative ... completely unforeseen save in the last half page of the story! From a nothing to a thought provoking meditation on duty v. Freedom, on the benefits v. destructions of conformity, all in the fact of removing the one sergeant who’d make them “soldiers” and bringing in a “Good Joe” from the hometown they all loved, but who did nothing to prepare them. An impressive turn, and not one really in line with Yates's strengths, as I’ve so far understood them, so all the the more impressive for it.

"No Pain Whatsoever": 10
- Devastating. Christ. That Yates style requires the right match to come to full flowering — and that WWII soldier reminiscence was not it. STORY: woman visits dying TB husband in hospital, bookended by trips there with some fair-weather friends and a fling she obviously doesn’t care about. Here's the loneliness we were promised.

"Glutton for Punishment": 10
- ... juxtapose this with Stanley Elkins short fiction, and marvel at the difference (epitomized in the midpoint thesis paragraph: “all the way down he stood with the ruddy, bright eyed look of a man fulfilled by pleasure; it wasn’t until he was out on the street, walking rapidly, that he realized how completely he had enjoyed himself.” And the importance of what follows: the terror this recognition instills in him). STORY: born loser actually loves losing, or at least is good at it, since his awareness of his fail proclivities starts to laden him with personal doom. Anyway, he loses his job and decides not to tell his wife, although he’s not strong enough to keep it from her, and he eventually does just that. A beautiful loser.

"Wrestler with Sharks": 8.75
- ... can’t help but think that our ultimate protagonist (Sobel) remained much less interesting than the newspaper for which and environment in which he worked, but that might just instead be a product of my own chronological remove from the milieu here depicted and, thereupon, my fascination with the to-contemporary-eyes-extraordinarily-foreign social environment on display, with its proletarian newspapermen and forthright trade unionists and proto-harbingers of doom (Elite snobbery vis a vis the working class and the impossibility of socialist, solidaristic Milieus within a broader capitalist framework.) In short, here’s the rare Yates in which the struggles of the individual acting within the “system” was, for once, less interesting than the system itself. That said, what a nice ending. STORY: steelworker with dreams of literary success goes to work for socialist/labor rag, and instead finds condescension and disappointment.

"Fun with a Stranger": 6.75
- The first thought, naturally, is that this story borrowed its genetic code from “Doctor Jack O’lantern”, given the shared subject matter of the common lives of elementary teachers. Yet, it actually has much more in common with “Jody Rolled the Bones” in its evocation of a cruel sonofabitch, who hopes that somewhere down the line some unexpected good might befall one of their pupils, in which case, mystified as to its provenance, they’ll look back and have no recourse but to chalk it up to the belated benefits of a cruel pedants pedagogy. Except here, Yates isn’t in a generous mood; he’s not willing to extend even that courtesy. He instead gives us the miser full bore. STORY: Ms. Snell’s a tyrant over her 3rd grade classroom, especially in comparison to the other grade teacher, Miss Cleary, who’s sweet young “lithe” and fun. The culmination: the students get a Christmas present (and not an afternoon-long party, as did the others), which is just an eraser. Snell’s glee in their disappointment is palpable. ... The perspectival turn halfway-thru, when the kids start “talking” about and considering Mrs. Snell as a teacher would their disappointing student. Good stuff.

"The B.A.R. Man": 9.5
- Well this is, as of yet, the apotheosis of the Yates story and male protagonist caricature — the ambiently distressed dullard, careening from small disappointments to grander discombobulations. Yes, it could be too much. Here, however, it’s not, thanks to the fluidity of Yates’s spiraling progression from dissatisfaction to violence, as well Yates ability to give us those necessary, small breathes of fresh air, when we escape the right third person on the protagonist and get a glimpse of how others are perceiving him and his actions (thinking here esp. of the wonderful transition between his stupidly confident expectation that, of course he’ll dance with this girl then take her home then sleep with her and the immediate knowledge that she finds him gross, exasperating, and exhausting). It’s good. STORY: man fights with wife and goes out on town, gloms on to some young soldiers, follows them to a club where they ditch him, and he eventually blindly channels that disaffection into violence at a leftist McCarthy target some right-wingers are randomly protesting.

"A Really Good Jazz Piano": 10
- A tome’s worth of emotional nuance, psychological insight, eyes-averting discomfort, and steady forward momentum packed into just a dozen pages. A Richard Yates story, in other words. STORY: two American expats in France, both fairly well-to-do, with their aimless wandering funded from home, laze about in Cannes, try and pick up women, and linger around American jazz bars. After befriending a black musician, the richer, and more cocksure, of the pair humiliates him during the pianists audition for a major gig in Vegas, all on account of some deluded principle that he’d be “selling out” by leaving the more artistically pure environs of Cannes for vapid, commercial US shores. Yates frames all of this finely, never spelling it out, but making it nonetheless more than clear, that these rich, spoiled, and secure white neer do wells have no place to tell this to Sid, the piano player, and, what is more, they themselves hate Europe and long for the creature comforts of home.

"Out with the Old": 7.25
- Done much better nearly everywhere in "No Pain Whatsoever"

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Collected Stories' includes two published collections ['Eleven Kinds of Loneliness' (1962) and 'Liars in Love' (1981)] alongside seven stories that had not appeared in print before and two more (quite lightweight) that appeared only in the prestigious 'Ploughshares' magazine in the mid-1970s.

I left this collection with mixed feelings. Yates is rightly positioned as an articulate literary 'spokesman' for male anxieties in the conformist post-war world. From that perspective, the 1962 collection is superb. It is a snapshot of a felt reality from a very sensitive young writer.

On the other hand, I am not sure Yates is well served by the full collection because what it tends to suggest is that his range was limited and his approach psychotherapeutic, unloading personal anxieties in a way that over time shows little progression.

If you read his biography and then review his stories you can see him plundering his own experiences, re-telling them through fictional scenarios where the tendency seems to be to mask himself somewhere between memoire and imagination.

His childhood is replayed. His personal insecurities are clearly in evidence in a remarkably self-deprecatory way. The war experience and time in a tuberculosis hospital return repeatedly as do trips to Europe. There is one story revisiting his time as a Hollywood scriptwriter.

The mixed feelings come from a sense of a considerable talent losing itself in an introspection that was being deprived of its social meaning as the world moved on from his childhood, wartime and marital demons. Yet often (earlier rather than later) he hits that sweet spot of revelation.

For example, he captures how the behaviour of the relatively young post-war American generation would act in a way reflecting Hollywood gestures and language. The tension between a rather grey reality and the dream factory is not overtly stated but it is present.

What is most moving perhaps is his ability to conjure up what it must have been like for very young conscripts in the last year of the war, thrown into danger with very little idea of what was happening or perhaps even why.

Whether he was actually in danger on the front or in a TB hospital cannot be judged from the tales. The internal evidence of the stories could be read as him imagining from his own experience or from that of people he knew but he is imagining situations in which he lived as observer or as participant.

The early stories are most insightful on what we now call 'gender relations'. Even if we discount what might be attributed to personal neurosis, the dynamic between the sexes is not quite what later feminism from its self-interested perspective might want us to accept.

The young American males of the 1950s had a very limited and unhealthy sexual education, bonded in an uncertain and contingent camaraderie in a war that then threw them back into a world defined by conservative cultural mores amidst women wholly uncomprehending of their trauma.

Women are presented as fulfilling their roles much as men did - home and children on the one side and another uncertain and mutually cautious camaraderie of desk discipline on the other. Both roles were under an economic cosh where the line between prosperity and poverty remained very fine.

The tone of Yates' stories is both accepting and mildly depressive. There is little resistance to conditions and puzzlement at the next set of young who, as beatniks first or hippies, decided not to accept conformity. Perhaps women broke free and men just remained puzzled over the coming years.

The two genders may as well have been two collusive, symbiotic but different species in this post-war world with little mutual comprehension. Indeed, Yates's portrayal of 'how women think' is more stereotypical than not, observed from outside in the hope of understanding.

More than once, women prove apparently 'intractable' and men to be in awe or fear of them even if expressed in petulant anger. Neither side really talks to each other. Both sides often engage in petty deceptions that seem necessary just to survive psychically in one piece.

Having survived war as both near-death experience and unutterable boredom, very young males returned in often early marriage to people they only think they know through the smoky glass of love (actually just desire) and then spend the rest of their lives 'coping' until something snaps.

Yates explores a wide range of largely male responses to their situation. It is no surprise to find a potential equivalent of Kesey's Nurse Ratched emerging in one of the TB hospital stories. If there is anxiety about women (more than about sex), it is not, however, truly misogynistic.

Women are clearly just 'the other' in these stories. Conformity is a contract between two 'othering' communities to maintain the world as it should be. Politics is not very present in the stories but we might find it curious that this is regarded as 'freedom' in contrast to communism.

Children appear as that which binds but also as selfish and demanding while Yates' childhood alter egos are insecure, overawed by stronger wilful females. Yates' own mother lurks in the wings periodically as a psychological issue that we will have to leave to the professionals to assess.

My recommendation is to make a real effort to read the initial 1962 collection and only the rest as footnotes to the stories although it will not be time wasted. There are certainly a few gems in the full collection - notably 'The Canal' which captures different soldierly reactions to the same incident.

Yates has a strong reputation amongst literary types. We can see why. He is a master of the craft of writing. He knows how to fictionalise experience and to bring human tensions into the open although not with any resolution (for often there is no resolution).

Perhaps the lack of 'success' for him later in life was because (if his short stories are anything to go by) he could not stop rehearsing issues that he never resolved but which had ceased to be of interest as society moved on. As a snapshot of a generation from one gender's point of view, his work excels.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second time around, and I've changed my rating from four to five stars. I adore Richard Yates (and am crazy-late to the Yates party). Like some others, I think he is to the 1950s what F. Scott Fitzgerald was to the 1920s, and in a similar style of realism. Awesome stuff. If you, too, are new to Yates, I recommend starting with Revolutionary Road.

-----

I decided to read only the stories from the book Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, so I'd have something wonderful to return to and to experience one complete book as it was originally published. I read each story in order, one kind of loneliness per evening. While I prefer his novels, I generally—though not without exception—prefer novels to short stories to sink my teeth into. Compared to other authors, this is a four or five star book; compared to Yates's novels, it only comes in at 3.5 stars. While this is an unfair ranking due to his sheer superiority as an author, the stories lack the depth of characters he gives us elsewhere.

[Kilean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revisiting this and good gracious and lord have mercy help my day over the fence, man, these stories are full of sentences packing a bevy of emotion and clarity and pulse. Yates had a rhythm. Sad as hell, but he writes like someone that's alive and knows what it sounds like when people actually talk to one another. Check out The B.A.R. Man and pay close attention to the first few paragraphs and what you learn about the man in question. Algren's short stories somehow led me, back in the day, to this dude, and I'll never stop visiting this collection. I don't give a hard fart about where literature or fiction is going, there's gold here.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked most of the stories. Real downers. Was recommended this as a fan of Raymond Carver. Still prefer Carver but was surprised by how much I enjoyed Yates' stories too. They have similarities. Usually about working class people dealing with issues that aren't necessarily resolved throughout the story but rather the characters finding themselves in a situation where they have to learn to live with these unresolved issues.

[BekahPG · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading these stories for a while, between other books. Revolutionary Road is still my absolute favorite piece of Yates' writing, but some of these stories come close. They are such vivid snapshots of mid century desolation and dissatisfaction. Sometimes hard to read, but still such a pleasure.

[Scott Snyder · Rating 3 out of 5]

i love yates' novels, and taken alone, the stories can be inspiring, but all together, the effect is diminishing. too many similarities, too many stories that feel unsure of themselves.

[Jenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best short story collection I've ever read. Of course, I am biased because Yates is one of my favorite authors.