poetsquib.com

Yates to me has always been synonymous with gardening. I’d never heard of Richard Yates The Great American Writer before the recent Richard Yates Revival (a movie is being made of his book Revolutionary Road and Vintage has been reissuing many of his books). He first came to my attention in an article in The Weekend Australian Review wherein someone wrote about this magnificent writer Yates and how people who have read him have a secret handshake and a maa-maa goat greeting…and so on

Cold Spring Harbour is not the best of Yate’s books. How do I know this? Well because there were pages of rave reviews in this edition of Cold Spring Harbour and they were all for other books by Yates, Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, and his Collected Stories. This is always a bad sign

Nonetheless this book was superbly written. The lives of Evan Shepard and his two young wives and assorted relatives, set in pre World War II American suburbia, are painfully and sharply observed without any sympathy

This is mundane realism at its best but the problem is, it’s just too depressing. Look at the cover. Is that not depressing enough? Here’s an example (below) of how wonderful but depressing his writing is. Not a word is wasted. Yates wants to depress you in an economic and understated fashion

Rachel would place a small electric fan on the table just before they sat down, because the weather was uncommonly hot and still for June, but the caged, buzzing, slowly turning face of it could only send faint new waves of warmth among the dishes. (Yates)

The characters are depressing, almost unbearably so. The hype is true, Yates was an exceptionally good writer but this story doesn’t give anything nice to the reader. It is claustrophobically gloomy and not one of the characters is likeable

I’d still be interested to read Revolutionary Road, though whether I can get hold of it in this two book town is another matter