Revolutionary Road and Richard Yates

Richard Yates was Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s favorite American contemporary novelist. Vonnegut told me so in a booze-soaked party in Sag Harbor after I mentioned that I had a long conversation with Yates a few years before when he was academic advisor at Boston U. for my sister-in-law and somehow ended up with me and my mother-in-law in their Lincoln, MA basement talking about everything. Christopher Hitchens, with whom I shared many booze-soaked afternoons in the Iron Gate restaurant across from where I worked at the Middle East Institute, reviews the movie coming out this Christmas in The Atlantic Monthly.

My memories of Yates were of a guy who wanted to understand the people he was talking to and about while he chain-smoked. His big failing was not getting the academic postmark of a college degree or even time at school after his stint in WWII. But I read Cold Spring Harbor and found he was a natural observer of human nature in the raw circumstances of everyday life. Christopher H. remains a sort of Dirk Bogarde of the mind, endlessly facile and epigrammatic, but not very substantial, as his review of the book [and it is evident that he probably hasn't seen the movie] skips along the surface---which given the subject of suburban life, is probably appropriate.