Man,” lives in Sunnyside, Queens, and has been married for ten years to a woman who can’t have children and who, tellingly, “earned more money than he did.” When he has lunch with three colleagues, conversation turns to military service, and Fallon is obscurely irritated by the complaining of his friends. These men are vulnerable, easily provoked by female competition or resistance, and their theatrical, role-playing speech haplessly shrouds and reveals their anxieties, in clouds of unknowing. Out of the apparently diplomatic conformity of mid-twentieth-century American realism-the sort of style that made short stories commercially salable-bursts the monstrous ego of Yates’s male characters, smashing all the eggshell niceties. Powers’s: the same richly restrained prose, luxuriously lined but plain to the touch the same anxious comedy the same very cold, appraising eye and the same superb ear for the foolish histrionics of speech. Because “Revolutionary Road” became the decade’s great, terrifying indictment of suburban surrender, Yates’s stories are often likened to John Cheever’s, but they are closer to J. Yates’s early stories, now gathered in an edition with “Revolutionary Road” and his 1976 novel “The Easter Parade” (Everyman’s Library $26), are highly disciplined, formally chaste. His later fiction was compulsive but not compelling, necessary to him but not to his readers, who would always chase the fire of his first novel in the embers of its successors. To put it brutally, he had about ten good years. That first novel was “Revolutionary Road” (1961)-the basis of a new movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet- and it could be said to have dissolved its creator’s career even as it founded it, because Yates never published a novel half as good again. Over the next few years, Yates made only a modest living from his stories, but they brokered his reputation, and secured the interest and encouragement of a publisher who, like all publishers, wanted a novel, not a book of stories. A cable brought the marvellous news, in unstopped sky-high capitals. There is a wonderful moment in Blake Bailey’s 2003 biography of Yates when, after fourteen unpublished short stories, the fifteenth (“Number 15 off the production line” is how Yates described it) is sent to The Atlantic, narrowly rejected, and then finally accepted-for two hundred and fifty extremely useful dollars. Paris was never the glamorous hubbub for Yates that it had been for an earlier literary generation, but it was there, and in Cannes, and then in London, that the young writer began his career. Friends and colleagues found these accommodations appallingly bleak for Yates they were accommodations for writing. In each there was a table for writing, a circle of crushed cockroaches around the desk chair, curtains made colorless by cigarette smoke, a few books, and nothing much in the kitchen but coffee, bourbon, and beer. (He was an alcoholic, but he rarely wrote while drunk.) He lived in New York, in Iowa, in Los Angeles, in Boston, and, finally, in Alabama, yet his homes were identical in their shabby discipline of neglect. There were two other compulsions, smoking and drinking, but they only killed him, while writing plainly kept him alive. Around the compulsion of writing he shaped everything else. Careless, but a literary workshop, too: Yates said that he was determined to produce short stories there “at the rate of about one a month.” Then twenty-five years old, he was beginning an indenture that would last until his death, in 1992. He had been there twice before, as a child and, later, as a soldier, but for him, as for so many American writers, it was less a place than a laurelled idea-the silvery and careless city of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In April, 1951, Richard Yates sailed from New York to Paris. Yates wrote male characters who are anxious, easily provoked by female resistance.
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