Yates, Richard (Vol. 7) | Yates, Richard 1926–
Yates, Richard 1926–
Yates is an American novelist and short story writer. Revolutionary Road is his best known work. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)
[Revolutionary Road, Yates's first novel,] is a vastly imperfect and vastly disturbing book, often blurred in focus by the intensity of its author's engagement, but always thoroughly in touch with what the novel is good enough to convince us is reality. It deals with the disintegration of a marriage in suburbia, but its true subject is neither the horrors of suburbia nor the frailty of modern marriage. The novel is really about the inadequacy of human beings to their own aspirations, and its target is not America but existence…. Yates seems to waver between a focus through Frank's point of view, basically one which elicits sympathy, and an omniscient focus which subjects both his protagonists to a savage contempt and leads almost to caricature. But despite...
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