Fiction

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

114475I read Richard Yates’s short story collection for the firstĀ  time back in the late eighties, and I’ve reread it at least once since then. It came to mind again recently as an example of keen — mercilessly keen — writerly observation, and I have spent the last two weeks revisiting it.

The experience has been as much a revelation of personal change as of esthetic pleasure. No one can deny that Eleven Kinds of Loneliness captures a real world in fiction. Yates trains a magnifying glass on eleven characters, one by one, in 1950’s New York. We meet World War II veterans, patients in tubercular wards, newly married young men (several of them writers) working at entry level jobs and searching for meaning, women whose domestic dreams are at various points of colliding with reality.

Yates has an extraordinary eye, and I felt again a kind of wonder at his ability to depict character with such fullness and economy. How did he do it? No Harriet the Spy-style notebook could ever hold the observations he must have made riding the subway, dining at restaurants, talking with friends, going to work. He has a flawless eye for detail, for all the little mannerisms and moments that make someone who they are. And he has compassion. Why else tell their stories?

But the familiar pleasure in these artistic qualities failed to outweigh the sorrow this time. I wondered why I didn’t remember that these stories are excruciating! Failed connections, left and right — imprisonment in self — insight coming too late — longing for friendship, unfulfilled. One reviewer, speaking of the whole body of Yates’ work, writes, “It is as if Yates were under some enchantment that compelled him to keep circling the same half-acre of pain.”

I’ve certainly enjoyed these stories before, but my experience was different this time. Maybe I’ve witnessed or experienced loneliness enough to feel it’s not an artistic subject to be examined in this relentless fashion without tossing the reader a bone more satisfying than technical excellence. I realize that all of life can’t be made into a Reader’s Digest feel-good story. But I wished that Yates had balanced his superior literacy in the many varieties of loneliness with at least a glimmer of hope here and there.

Perhaps the one thing that can be said for these stories is that they compel the reader to notice the “lives of quiet desolation” all around, and to supply the missing element. We have to read questioningly. What would have redeemed the story? What was the character listening for? Yates doesn’t supply the answers; we have to. In that sense, the book situates us exactly where we are in “real life.” It’s like a flight simulator, giving us the opportunity to practice responding to the kinds of emergencies we may face in the air. For the moment, I’m glad to have finished this “lesson,” but Eleven Kinds of Loneliness will hang like smoke in the atmosphere of my imagination for a good while this time.

2 Comments

  • hopeinbrazil

    What a great review. I can’t say that you’ve convinced me to read this author, but you have helped add to my thinking about the conversation of what makes good art/literature, etc.