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| Eleven finely-crafted short stories |
Like
much of humankind at the moment, I'm self-isolating because of the coronavirus
pandemic. My consolations - as ever in any very strange and difficult
situation - include music and books. For the past few weeks, my great companion
has been an engaging collection of short stories called Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates.
The
book's title might not suggest any kind of light relief and - it's true - it's
not a laugh a minute. However, these eleven stories are witty, compelling,
finely-crafted and highly entertaining.
I'd
never heard of Richard Yates before but I'm a fan of short stories and came
across his name in connection with other perhaps better known American short
story writers like Raymond Carver and John Cheever. All three authors are
published in Vintage Classics paperbacks.
The
blurb biography tells me Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York, served in
the US army and, in the sixties, worked briefly as a speech-writer for Robert
Kennedy. Yates' prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first
novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book
Award in 1961. He died in 1992. Though it passed me by at the time, I've
since discovered Sam Mendes directed a 2008 film adaptation of Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. (Maybe that's one to
watch in our Covid-19 lockdown.)
Yates'
stories are set in suburban 1950s America, where frustrated office workers and
would-be novelists live in fear of redundancy, while at the same time desperately
hoping to break out of their particular version of the American Dream gone
slightly wrong. There are unhappy marriages - Yates was twice divorced -
and, alongside all the rat-race hack-writers there are brilliantly sympathetic portraits
of misfit school-kids, reluctant soldiers and long-term patients
in tuberculosis hospitals.
Yates
has a fondness for titles with multiple meanings: Out with the Old (a kind of One
Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest set in a tuberculosis ward) describes the experience of
being an in-patient on the eve of New Year, but sombrely reminds us that not
all the patients would survive the best available treatments for TB in the 1950s.
But
there are touches of lightness in well-observed character descriptions. Describing
Bernie, a character in Builders who's
a cab driver in search of a ghost-writer for his memoirs, Yates writes: "His head must have been half again
the size of mine, with thinning black hair washed straight back, as if he'd
stood face-up in the shower..."
A Glutton for Punishment is an outstanding example of a story
with a twist - but supremely satisfying - ending while Fun with a Stranger compares the very different experiences children
in third grade can have, depending on whether their teacher is a Mrs Cleary or a
Miss Snell: "It was not uncommon to
cry in Miss Snell's class, even among the boys. And ironically, it always
seemed to be during the lull after one of these scenes - when the only sound in
the room was somebody's slow, half-stifled sobbing, and the rest of the class stared
straight ahead in an agony of embarrassment - that the noise of group laughter
would float in from Mrs Cleary's class across the hall..."
Yates
is brilliant at capturing that sense that everybody else must be having more
fun than we are. He's also subtle enough
to show that, whether it's in a schoolroom, in the army or in the workplace, we
can all learn something from situations that don't, on the surface, seem like a
whole lot of fun.
