Dismembering the American Dream: The Life and Fiction of Richard Yates

4. Disrupting the Facade

4 Disrupting the Facade In sharp contrast to the number of inauthentic and self-­absorbed individuals in Richard Yates’s work—the high self-­ monitors, as Mark Snyder refers to them1 —the reader only rarely encounters a low self-­monitor, and they stand out as people apart. However, such characters are not exempt from the caustic gaze of this author and could not be described as heroic. Yates is always unsentimental in his portraits so that these fig­ ures also display unfavorable qualities, but they have an integrity lacking in the dominant Yatesian fig­ ure. John Givings in Revolutionary Road and Sergeant Reece in the short story “Jody Rolled the Bones” are a couple of notable examples of the obdurate low self-­ monitor in Yates’s fiction. In ways that are distinct, both characters play criti­ cal roles in shaping the moral coloring of the stories we read. As an institutionalized mental patient, John Givings has a free­ dom from the constraints of what is perceived as normal social conduct. Like the fool in King Lear he speaks with of­ten-­ impeccable logic as he punctures a fragile social atmosphere by asking questions no one wants to address because to do so is to admit to the fact that there are performances being enacted. His 5. Richard Yates, 1962. Taken to promote Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Reproduced courtesy of Grace Schulman. Disrupting the Facade 65 uncomfortable truths act as a counterpoint to other views being expressed, ensuring that the reader remains outside looking in at the Wheelers and their friends with his bewilderment and his criti­ cal eye. His very presence causes a disturbance and he appears to be blithely unaware of this, but the reader gradually becomes more certain that the disturbance he causes is deliberate and constructed: “He was making a slow, stiff-­ legged circuit of the living room, still wearing his cap, examining everything.”2 His brazen speech and unpredictable movements, unconstrained by acceptance of the codes of politeness , mean that he is a dangerous presence, but not because he is mad; on the contrary, he seems to be ruthlessly sane and prone to wrong-­ footing everyone. The point is that no one knows how to read this apparently unself-­ conscious individual, and the tension he excites is palpable. In response to April Wheeler’s polite request that her guests sit down, Givings’s behavior is bizarre and simple, threatening and childlike: “John removed his cap and laid it on one of the bookshelves; then he spread his feet and dropped to a squat, sitting on his heels like a farmhand, bouncing a little, reaching down between his knees to flick a cigarette ash neatly into the cuff of his work pants. When he looked up at them now his face was free of tension; he had assumed a kind of pawky, Will Rogers expression that made him look intelligent and humorous.”3 His behavior is de-­ stabilizing, and deliberately so. Yates describes him as having “assumed a . . . Will Rogers expression,” not as “having” one, creating the impression, therefore, that Givings is playing a game that mocks them all. Perceiving that life is full of such shallow performances, Givings adopts his own. He is always several steps ahead of those who take their performances seriously, people such as his mother and the Wheelers. Givings’s hosts, as well as his mother, sense they are being derided, but they neither understand it nor do they know how to undercut it; he is too quick for them. They are vari­ ously described in poses of acute discomfort as Givings attempts to puncture the social facade and feeds back distorted versions of comments his mother had made earlier about the Wheelers. A comment such as “the nice young revolutionaries on Wheeler Road,”4 for instance , captures the tone of her prattling idiom without being exactly what she will have said. He uses the phrase, giving the words a deliberately patronizing , sarcastic inflection, to ensure it disturbs the fragile social equilibrium . He repeats his mother’s inane chatter and asks them implicitly to recognize his description of it: “You know how she is? How she talks and talks and talks and never says anything?”5 To ensure that the reader understands the effect this man is having on the group, Yates depicts Givings’s audience in vari­ ous poses of awkwardness and embarrassment. April is seen 66 Chapter 4...