Are we having fun yet? Eleven kinds of loneliness in self-isolation

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.