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

Foreword by DeWitt Henry

Foreword This admirably thorough and well-­ balanced criti­ cal study is corrective and, more broadly, instructive. Yates and his oeuvre of seven novels and two collections of stories remain underappreciated. Kate Charlton-­ Jones’s work brings to mind two of my favorite studies of novelists: F. R. Leavis’s D. H. Lawrence: Novelist and Carlos Baker’s Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Both argue, as does Charlton-­ Jones, for reappreciation and better understanding of the art. We once had D. H. Lawrence, the artless prophet (if not pornographer ), and Ernest Hemingway, the baby-­talking minimalist, and now Yates is portrayed as a pessimist and artistic throwback, obsessively mining the “same half-­ acre of pain.” Charlton-­ Jones helps us, with her particular cultural distance (as an English reader, as a contemporary of Yates’s daughters, and as a feminist), to contextualize Yates and “the prescience of his writing,” especially his “insight into marriage, women’s rights, gender roles, and social interaction.” She compares the account in Yates’s fiction of the Ameri­ can 1950s and 1960s to accounts by sociologists, social historians, film historians, and other commentators, but stops short of recommending Yates primarily for his his­ tori­cal value, as one might Sinclair Lewis on the 1920s. While Yates has much to say about his times, she argues, he has more to say about life in general. In her exemplary reading, Charlton-­ Jones is more sensitive than earlier critics to the “careful sys­ tem of narrative layering,” “authorial ironies,” and “subtly inflected descriptions” in Yates; in fact, her appreciation of “ironic realism”—something rarely discussed this side of Wayne C. Booth’s Rhetoric of Irony—may be her strongest contribution. Baker sought to teach us about Hemingway’s art, but Yates’s is a difficult, high art. She also proves as a reader to be as well informed and perceptive about such postmodern contemporaries of Yates as John Cheever, Kurt Vonnegut, xii Foreword and John Barth as she is of J. D. Salinger and John O’Hara. She makes the significant point that Yates “helped to modernize the realist novel and, to an extent, helped to narrow the gap between the metafictionalists and traditionalists .” In addition, she explores the comparison of Yates to his professed masters, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Flaubert. She makes apt use of quotes from Yates’s letters, interviews, and other sources in his own words. Charlton-­ Jones organizes her discussion by such key topics as “performative selves,” “gender roles,” and “parental control and sexuality,” and on each topic she ranges gracefully among Yates’s major and minor texts, early and later. She also brings the history of film to bear on Yates’s use of movies for his characters; it is the analogue of Don Quixote’s absorption with medieval romances. She is able to criticize Yates’s flawed art as well as his successes. Even though “Yates’s fiction challenges the bigoted views of the era,” she finds that his narrative perspective falters in the later novels when it comes to mother fig­ ures and women’s sexuality. Echoing feminist critiques of Hemingway, she speculates about “the work of a man who fears women’s sexuality because he does not fully understand it and because he fears what it will reveal about him.” Surely Yates himself would have flinched at this suggestion, but he would have been proud overall and gratified by the accuracies of Charlton-­ Jones’s reading of his art. After her attentive and perceptive study, lesser readings of Yates will no longer prove acceptable. —DeWitt Henry, Emerson College ...