Bergsonian Critique

It would be fair to confess that my adulation for Revolutionary Road had galvanized my impulses to purchase the rest of Richard Yates’s oeuvres, possibly as a self-conceivable mean to prop up his forgotten works even by the tinniest margins. I am fixated on reading them sequentially by their years of publication, simply to get a sense of Yates’s ruminations and intents after he went through each of his stories, and to observe whether he would do anything to circumvent his myopic endeavors and low sales. After a collection of short stories and two novels later, it seems hardly the case, so far, that he lost his domestic realism in favor of maintaining a lucrative career in writing. He might have lost some of his sensibility in A Special Providence and Disturbing the Peace, his stories, however, shrewdly remain as vehement and uninhibited as they come.

Perhaps, if some of us place Revolutionary Road higher than the aforementioned novels is because Yates’s kept his characters in the dark far too much for us to discern and far too cynical for us to like. Frank and April Wheeler, the protagonists of his first masterpiece, were essentially just that, but their disparagement seemed necessary for their own survival. On the contrary, Robert and Alice Prentice, the son and mother in A Special Providence, were so caught up with their own strife to be distinguished that they have completely overlooked their shortcomings. That, if they have stopped pleasing their selfish desires and the desires of others they would probably have rectified their future before it is too late.

But this is the beauty of Yates’s spare, deadpan prose and narrative structure, which morbidly match the severity and sullenness of war and its aftermath. The cruel, unflinching fact that Robert’s coltish enthusiasm is not enough to win him popularity and heroism in battle or among his comrades. The unspectacular gritty reality that there’s so little waiting for him back home to persevere, whether it’s in his subpar academic accomplishments or the fallacies of his histrionic mother. And that, for once, Yates’s trademark murkiness does not seem out of place or excessively pervasive.

Indeed, the deft sketches of Prentice’s colleagues of war burgeon an element of humanity to a sordid and merciless theme; not to mention the bullies and power-freaks whom are quite complex in their rendering, such as John Quint, the articulate intellectual who Prentice idolizes, and Lieutenant Covely, whose down-to-earth camaraderie and desire to be liked barely mask a fear others of his rank rarely display publicly.

Of course it is the single mother of Robert, Alice Prentice, who filches our attention so persistently just as much as she does in her life. At the beginning, when her son is practically gritting his teeth to stop himself from snapping at her, she seems almost comical; a theatrical woman with delusions of an extravagant nature, to be able to persuade herself that her big break as a baroque sculptor is just around the corner. Yates’s description of her pitifully melodramatic outbursts of breast-clutching, vociferous sobbing and falling to the ground kicking her feet is gleefully, wickedly amusing. But as he reveals more of her past, her selfishness is tinged with poignancy.

Such perceptive and sympathetic emotions are scarcely analogous to what we may reflect in Disturbing the Peace: a semi-biographical and a tale of alcoholism starring a pathetic and intriguing man named John Wilder. As a successful advertising agent and a crippling survivor of the society, Wilder descends and overcomes his fantasies and madness in fluctuation, depending on the amount of purgatives and the company of his young mistress. It’s a story about a self-absorbed man who we want him to better his own inadequacies, even though we still find it hard to root for his success; a rather predictable outcome, considering that Yates has created Wilder as a vessel for his own disgrace, and his excruciatingly harrowing experiences as a chronic drinker. Writing Disturbing the Peace is also his way of admitting defeat and that regardless of his own convictions he wasn’t immune from the postmodern meta-fictions that dominated the 60s and 70s.

Evidently, the portrait of John Wilder is well drafted, and his downward spiral to psychotic addiction is gut-wrenchingly dreamlike, despite Yates’s concise and unfussy writing. They are many moments where we feel embarrassed for his idiotic slurs, but we are so driven by our own empathy that we wish him a safe and quick recovery. Really, it is up to us whether we moralize or debase Wilder’s actions and weaknesses, and it is up to us to ponder his infidelity and childish ventures as necessary means of his survival. Most certainly, however, is that Wilder isn’t superficial, and perhaps he’s more relevant than we might think he is. His story is an intimation that providence can be sometimes more disturbing than it’s wishfully preconceived.

In summation, it would be also fair to admit that these novels have entertained me quite a lot, in spite of their somber and depressing depreciations on human vulnerability. Yates skillfully managed to testify how much in American culture has faded in 20th century, and how much from that odd times remain lively in the current, moral imaginations. He effortlessly situates in the contemporary, new computer age, and able to chronicle his early fascinations and disappointments with empty communication, which has led many Americans to self-absorption, narcissism, megalomania, and dejection. Undoubtedly, this is an amazing feat for an author whom the time seems to have forgotten him.