This bleak vision pervades Yates's Collected Stories, written over a period of thirty years but set almost exclusively during the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations. From the tentative efforts of his first collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962), which enumerated various strains of human isolation (an adopted boy in a new school; two Americans out of their depth in the jazz clubs of postwar France) with an almost scientific precision, to the mature genius of late stories such as "Liars in Love" and "Saying Goodbye to Sally," Yates proved himself to be without equal as a chronicler of American solitude. Although many of his characters initially seem to be suffering from simple cases of the suburban blues (nothing that a trip to Paris or a year off to write that novel wouldn't cure), it soon becomes clear that the facile distinction between the bourgeois and the bohemian is a reflection of the characters' own self-delusion rather than of the author's agenda. Again and again Yates's people misdiagnose the cause of their loneliness as a boring job or a conventional marriage, when these are in fact merely symptoms of a desolation that endures even after they manage to break free of the mainstream. Although his stories have their share of unimaginative housewives and gray-flannel men who sink without a trace into the vast oatmeal of the American monoculture, the real pitfall facing his characters comes when they try to convince themselves that salvation lies outside of the ordinary. Thus the two women who attempt to set up a liberated, cosmopolitan haven in Westchester County in "Trying Out for the Race" soon find their idyll ruined by their own weakness and petty squabbling. As Yates wrote of the older of the pair, "if self-deception was an illness she was well into its advanced stages." Like so many of his characters, these women try to bolt the door against bland convention but manage only to lock it in. Jack Fields, the young writer in "Saying Goodbye to Sally," also seems to have escaped from the crushing grayness of the American middle when he gets a novel published and is then invited out to Hollywood to work on a film. But this apparent release from the ordinary only lands him in a different sort of solitude. His affair with his agent's secretary is doomed to bitter dissolution not so much by Jack's short-term contract as by the fine print in his soul, which allows him "to entertain the thought that he might be a self-destructive personality after all." Then "What saved him ... was his knowledge that any number of sanctimonious people had agreed to hang that bleak and terrible label on F. Scott Fitzgerald too." Although Yates's literary peers were often willing to blame their characters' alienation on the big bad world, Yates had the honesty to look within those damaged personalities for the true cause: the self-deluding belief that their emotional flaws are romantic rather than simply sad.

From Atlantic Unbound:



(September 21, 2000)

Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, argues that the time has come "to reweave the fabric of our communities." Interviews: "Lonely in America" (September 21, 2000)Robert Putnam, the author ofargues that the time has come "to reweave the fabric of our communities."

It is no mistake that Jack Fields sees himself in terms of Fitzgerald, whose spirit haunts not just this story but all of Yates's fiction. Fitzgerald's preoccupation with romantic delusion was a theme that Yates made his own, updating it to the ascendant middle-class ethos of the 1950s. At first blush Fitzgerald's Jazz Age characters, who crashed and burned in a blaze of class and money, seem to have little in common with Yates's doomed dreamers, who quietly try to break out of a web of corporate headquarters, ticky-tacky suburban housing, cocktail parties, and amateur dramatics that Daisy and Tom Buchanan would never have known. But a closer reading reveals that they are engaged in the same sad and fascinating process of trying to flee loneliness. The only thing separating Jack Fields from Monroe Stahr is that the latter gets a seat at the Brown Derby.