Yates describes everything with deadly precision, then goes on cutting everything closer and closer to the bone. Dramatic writers find novels unbearable because novelists mostly junk word on word, incident on incident. He wants you to see everything he describes. The highest compliment I can pay him is to say that he writes like a screenwriter, not like a novelist. Yates's gloom is made tolerable by his lack of heartlessness and because he believed that humans might somehow handle their own lives, even if they never appeared to do so very satisfactorily.Īccording to David Hare: 'Yates belongs with Fitzgerald and Hemingway as the three unarguably great American novelists of the 20th century. Nick Hornby, who finds the novels, apart from Revolutionary Road, 'too schematically gloomy to breathe properly', tells me by email that he prefers the short stories. Yatesians exchange what Ford felicitously calls 'a sort of cultural-literary handshake' when we identify each other. I am now aware of the existence of a fraternity including Nick Hornby, Kate Atkinson, David Hare, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion and Richard Ford. Many confess to finishing the book in tears. Those to whom I now hand out copies of Revolutionary Road react as I did, calling nervously, to say that the book seems very sad and again, when they have finished, promising to pass it on. Describing Frank and April Wheeler as characters in a suburban novel is like saying that Madame Bovary is a provincial doctor's wife, but otherwise I remain deeply grateful for the recommendation. 'You don't know Revolutionary Road?' she asked. I had tried, without much success, to read Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and I expressed some reservations about the surplus of fluency of John Updike's Rabbit books. I was alerted to the existence of Richard Yates by a sharp young magazine editor, in the course of a dinner conversation about books and films describing the American suburbs. 'It probably didn't help my general sense of well-being, if you know what I mean, because the ending is a real downer.' 'I wouldn't recommend finishing it on Christmas Day, in a cold-water bedsit,' JJ says about Yates's masterpiece.

'I was actually going to jump with a copy - not only because it would have been kinda cool, and would've added a mystique to my death but because it might have been a good way of getting more people to read it.' But JJ's plans misfire when he forgets the book fortunately for Hornby's distinctly Yatesian novel, he decides not to kill himself.

' a totally awesome novel,' the character, JJ, tells us. O ne of the would-be suicides in Nick Hornby's novel A Long Way Down plans to go out in style with a copy of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road in his pocket.

The easter parade by richard yates