At the end of the last [story in "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness,"] the narrator says: "I'm not even sure if there are any windows in this particular house…." The house is a metaphor for the story itself, which marks, I believe, a significant step forward in Richard Yates' art. It leads one to expect the same sort of excellence in his future short stories as he achieved in his first novel, "Revolutionary Road."

"The house of fiction has ∗∗∗ not one window, but a million," Henry James wrote, "every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable ∗∗∗ by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will." The windows that Mr. Yates opens on experience move on well-oiled hinges. The individual vision is, however, lacking in some of them: we have seen the view and the characters before. In these stories Mr. Yates has submitted his considerable talent to the formula and has been ground by the mill into mediocrity.

This is particularly true of "Jody Rolled the Bones," the one about the tough drill-sergeant, and "The Best of Everything," about a boy and girl the day before their marriage. Here he has fallen into the trap that yawns before every short-story writer: the urge to be definitive…. Even in these, Mr. Yates demonstrates that he can use the convention without sacrificing a jot of his skill and care. His dialogue captures the sound and rhythm of real speech and his details are exact and memorable.

The title of the collection more or less defines the theme of each story. The writer takes individuals who are caught up in an institution—a hospital, a school, marriage—and whose loneliness stems from their inability to come to terms with it. In the more conventional stories, the isolated individual is too impersonal to be effective, but in the more original ones, Mr. Yates achieves a sharp sense of pathos. In several, particularly "Doctor Jack-o-Lantern" and "A Really Good Jazz Piano," the reader feels at the end that shock of recognition of unex-pected rightness that is the peculiar reward of reading a first-rate story.

All Mr. Yates' talents are demonstrated in the last story, "Builders." Here he has left the shadow of O. Henry far behind and is moving into the orbit of Chekhov. It is about a writer (the narrator) and a rather pathetic taxi-driver who persuades him to ghost-write his experiences. The taxi-driver gives the narrator the metaphor about building a house for writing a story; he also starts him along the road toward a sense of his own pretension. The story does not attempt to be definitive, but only moves toward a definition.

In the formula story (the kind that the taxi-driver wants the narrator to write), the characters are merely functions of the situation. In a story such as this the situation grows naturally out of the characters. It is open-ended: it illustrates the complexities and not the simplicities of human nature. "Builders" shows that the house of fiction can illuminate life only when it avoids prefabricated materials. (pp. 4, 45)