Top 6 - Richard Yates

One day in 2002 there was a little review in The Times that began, 'Stop right there.' It drew one's attention to the new edition of Richard Yates' Collected Stories and said that this was the real thing. It turned out to be exactly right and I've rarely been more grateful for a review.

Later, I'd like to think that my piece in The Reader magazine played a small part in the revival of interest in his books although it has to be said that it is more likely to have been due to the film of Revolutionary Road. At that time, I collected all the novels in old editions from abebooks, several coming from America, because only Revolutionary Road was in print here then. Now, you can get any of them in a new reprint.

A Glutton for Punishment was one piece that stood out from that first book, although the book didn’t have any weak points.
For a little while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends.
through to getting home having been axed from his awful office job,
And then with a great deflating sigh he collapsed backward into the chair, one foot sliding out on the carpet and the other curled beneath him. It was the most graceful thing he had done all day. ‘They got me,’ he said.
A Wrestler with Sharks tells of a writer with big hopes stuck in terrible hack job writing for trade magazines, dreaming of his own by-line, with nine unpublished books to his name. Yates is brilliant at observation as well as catching the nuances of vernacular American but in stories like these it is a great sympathetic achievement to give his characters dignity when their circumstances are so cruelly delineated.
In The Best of Everything we have every right to guess that Ralph’s drinking with the fellas is going to be more important to him than his marriage to Grace.
Of the novels, one doesn’t have to set Revolutionary Road apart as the best known but having come first and been successful, setting the tone for his small tragedies in desperate middle class families, one could hardly leave it out.
Cold Spring Harbor beautifully catches the relationship of Evan and Rachel and because it is a re-read of Young Hearts Crying that has brought Yates back to mind, the fine writing in that is freshest in my memory and gets ahead of the other candidates for that reason if no others.