I finally got around to reading Richard Yates’ much lauded first novel, Revolutionary Road, and, despite all the hype and blurbery, it was a huge disappointment. No, it was not the sort of patent PoMo garbage that is pushed by the David Foster Wallace or Dave Eggers sort, nor is it the deliterate crap foisted upon readers by T.C. Boyle nor Joyce Carol Oates. In fact, despite stylistic differences and thematic concerns that do not mix, the writer Yates’ book most brought to my mind was the vastly overrated Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison — specifically her unfortunately overpraised novel Beloved. Like that book, Revolutionary Road could have used a good editor to weed through the structural flaws and the melodramatic characters.
Perhaps the biggest connection that hit me with both books is that the main characters and story that both novels focused on were not the best characters and stories in either book. Beloved’s silliness could have been redeemed had the novel focused on the character that was imprisoned in Andersonville, but after creating this great character, Morrison did nothing with him and dropped him to continue on with the banal and tearjerking tale of mother and ghost. One of the first rules a great artist learns and follows is to be willing to recognize and drop something that is not working in favor of something that is, because one can always return to the original failed premise later, and retry. But, sometimes there is only one opportunity to go with something that can lead to greatness. Similarly, Yates failed the same test as Morrison, opting for the cartoon cutout caricatures of the novel’s main couple, Frank and April Wheeler, instead of exploring the vastly more well sketched interior life of the supporting character, Shep Campbell.
This failure to seize the moment, or as Yates and his generation might have melodramatically cheered, ‘Carpe diem!,’ lies at the heart of Yates’ fatal flaw as a writer, in general. When I reviewed Yates’ Selected Stories, I noticed this tendency, too. I wrote, ‘Yates is a very good writer, at his best, which is much better than many short stories from far bigger name writers like Fitzgerald, O’Connor, Faulkner, Salinger, and the like. Yet, he never quite breaches greatness in any of the stories. They lack an X Factor — be it a great end, a tale that works on multiple levels, or a sustained lyric impulse to his descriptions and metaphors. Some critics have cited him as an influence on Raymond Carver, and there is certainly a linkage in the tales, but Carver achieves greatness in quite a sizable number of his tales, because he is daring, and risky. Yates, for all his skill at portraying the yearning nobodies of life, is a safe and steady writer, yet his best lines and tales seep inward like the best of writing does. He has no abominable tales, like Carver does, but his best pales to Carver’s….’
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