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

Conclusion

Conclusion It has now been a few years since the film Revolutionary Road1 was released, and the attention it brought anew to Richard Yates’s work has understandably waned. However, his fiction is no longer languishing in sec­ ond-­ hand bookshops, unread or admired by only a distant few. The film brought so much attention to his fiction that there have been several reprints of all his published works in the last few years. Universities have finally placed Yates 14. Yates speaking to students at Emerson College, Boston, in the early 1980s. The photo, which was taken by Karen Couture, was uncovered by DeWitt Henry and is reprinted courtesy of Emerson College. 208 Conclusion on their syllabuses and people across America and Europe no longer ask, “Richard who?” or “Is that Y-­ E-­ A-­ T-­ S?” However, and despite Blake Bailey’s masterful biography, to date there has been no extended criti­ cal appraisal of his fiction. This book is an attempt in that direction. I have endeavored to let Yates’s voice do the talking. Using a detailed analy­ sis of many passages from a range of his novels and short stories, I have investigated his technique and some of the important issues his work brings to the fore. Bleak? Yes. Yates’s stories resonate with the sensibilities of a man who found much in the human condition that disturbed and alienated him. But Yates was also a deeply compassionate writer, attuned to the difficulties of life in the 1950s and 1960s for men and women. He creates characters who, although flawed and failing, are not condemned. As Richard Price expresses it in his introduction to the new Everyman edition of Yates’s work, “Yates pities his characters but has no choice but to doom them.”2 With humor that of­ten suggests that their weaknesses are also his, Yates exposes pretension and arrogance in the day-­ to-­ day interactions of husbands and wives, office workers, and neighborhood friends, and the one thing we can be sure about is that these relationships will always collapse. But Yates’s writing is so understated that the reader scarcely realizes how, or even when, the collapse happened. As Price suggests, the tone of Yates’s very particular voice is perfectly in tune with his characterizations: “In part, the beauty and the genius of his voice lies in how its gently inexorable tone so eerily mirrors the muffled helplessness of the characters themselves.”3 It is apparent from the work of many social historians looking back at the late 1950s that there was an inconsistency between America’s ­egalitarian ideals and the fact that social stratification was still very much part of postwar society . Exploring this inconsistency was Richard Yates’s project; dispelling the growing myth of Ameri­can exceptionalism was the wider task. There was disparity between what was actually happening and what people wanted to say was happening, as Vance Packard suggested: “The discrepancy arises partly as a result of a generalized desire on the part of United States adults—particularly businessmen—to support the Ameri­ can Dream. Also it arises from the widespread assumption that the recent general rise in available spend­ing money in this country is making everybody equal. Class, in fact, has several faces and income is just one of them.”4 Po­ liti­ cal rhetoric that suggested that class distinctions had been all but eradicated was, historians indicate, blinkered and idealistic. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States of America was a newly ascendant nation. With its rapidly increasing industrial output, and with a workforce swelled by return­ ing GIs, it was investing in its future. Postwar building projects and the growth of suburbia fed into Conclusion 209 a general desire to be upwardly mobile and to ignore the facts that social stratification was an uncomfortable corollary to this wealth-­ based mobility. The growth of the advertising industry was part of the general thrust for­ ward and socially upward: “The prize darlings of the advertisers, however, are the families who move about a great deal . . . people who move frequently undergo a tremendous ‘upgrading urge.’ With each move a family makes, it tries to get a better house and more of the ‘extras.’ . . . If they move into an area where quite a number of the neighbors have clothes driers, they feel they must have one, too, and quickly.”5 Describing an Ameri...