Liars and Saints

A ranking of Richard Yates's novels (because: why not?) ...... THE BEST: "The Easter Parade." Amazingly brisk and authoritative. Heartbreaking. Characters who seem "real." Startling twists. THE RUNNER-UP: "Revolutionary Road." I just think it could be a bit shorter. I do love the garrulous real estate agent and the painful office scenes. THE MIDDLE: "A Good School" (you feel like you know these people, and you care about them), "Cold Spring Harbor" (cringe-inducing in the best way). THE REST: "A Special Providence" (the Mom scenes are amazing, and yet the war scenes show Yates is *not* omnipotent), "Disturbing the Peace" (meh), and "Young Hearts Crying" (diverting, but maybe not the most urgent or important thing Yates has written). And there you have it. Happy Weekend!

The aching, crying need for will and purpose in your life--anybody's life--was something Charles Shepard knew about from long and helpless experience. He was a retired army officer, a man with poetic habits of thought that he'd always tried to suppress, and it often seemed that his own capacity for zeal had vanished with the Armistice of 1918. As an impassioned young second lieutenant of infantry, newly married to the prettiest girl at the officers' club dance and reasonably sure she would pray for him, he had arrived in France three days after the war ended--and his disappointment was so intense that more than a few other officers had to tell him, impatiently, not to be silly about it. "I'm NOT," he would insist, "I'm NOT." But he always knew there'd be no escaping the truth; he had even begun to suspect that a queasy sense of abortion might haunt the rest of his life. This passage from Richard Yates's "Cold Spring Harbor...

...You speak of your Army comrades as "brutally stupid." I too am surrounded by the type, and can find little compassion for them. Have you read Farrell's Studs Lonigan ? Do so, and you will find the majority of my classmates in its pages. They are without minds; they are without purpose. They think it "Hot sh*t" to roll in the bed of some downtrodden whore and to talk of it lasciviously afterwards. I am not shocked by their antics -- they amuse me-- but I find it depressing to realize that these are specimens of the finest America has to offer in her young manhood. And if this is what one encounters in the V-12, I can imagine that the caliber is still lower in a unit such as yours, which must include the very dregs of society. Well, C'est la guerre. With regard to religion, I suppose this will startle you (remembering our talks at school about Schopenhauer, etc.) but I am no longer an atheist. In the past several months I have taken honest st...

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce. That happened in 1930, when Sarah was nine years old and Emily five. Their mother, who encouraged both girls to call her “Pookie,” took them out of New York to a rented house in Tenafly, New Jersey, where she thought the schools would be better and where she hoped to launch a career in suburban real estate. It didn’t work out--very few of her plans for independence ever did--and they left Tenafly after two years, but it was a memorable time for the girls. “Doesn’t your father ever come home?” other children would ask, and Sarah would always take the lead in explaining what a divorce was. “Do you ever get to see him?” “Sure we do.” “Where does he live?” “In New York City.” “What does he do?” “He writes headlines. He writes the headlines in the New York Sun.” And the way she said it made clear that they ought to...