I have a good habit of not doing what I don’t want to do. Novelist and short story writer Richard Yates was the same way. Only he crucified the USA and took it down in the process of being free.
Yates had emphysema, epilepsy, bouts of mental illness, was an alcoholic, and smoked 5 packs of cigarettes a day. He died in 1992 at the age of 66 during a routine minor procedure. Like hard-living jazzeteer Chet Baker, one wonders how he lived that well that long. If Yates had been a vegetarian jogger, he probably would have been gone of an embolism at 40.
With his habits, what could you do for a living? Why, of course, like everybody else today, he taught. Creative writing. Beats a cubicle at Social Services, right?
He didn’t make much money as a writer until he died. His best novel, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, was made into a good movie after his death, and people found their way back to the book. It was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. It went up against J. D. Salinger’s FRANNY AND ZOOEY and the winner, Walker Percy’s THE MOVIEGOER, both tremendous books.
Often described as a sociological novel – ugh – it blisteringly attacked consumerism, class, family life, children, the suburbs, and the inane kind of lives and work that Americans settle for.
I didn’t understand the novel the first time I read it. When I re-read it again a few days ago, I couldn’t put it down. Perhaps Facebook has trained me in the finer art of discerning what’s wrong with most people. Yates had it figured out before vacuum tubes had disappeared.
His suburb dwellers settle for jobs that they don’t like, commutes that they hate, families that they don’t want, busywork that keeps all this shit buried, mindless business in general, drinking, smoking, oversleeping, undersleeping, fucking neighbors, and avoiding at all costs their creative selves, the latter because being creative in a flowlike sense threatens a loss of control which Americans absolutely can not stand.
Americans do this because they do what’s expected of them. Conformity. We may seem more lively today than in Yates’ era, but it’s superficial: tats, blue hair, carrying guns, whatever, it’s just a whacko attention-getting device or bloated lips or burned skin – even politicians show off their Nazi skull and crossbones tats today and the most “progressive” among us dismiss it as nothing.
All of this is in the name of conformity. Doing what’s expected us us. Being a rebel in the way of our various fragmented tribes online. We have nothing else. Yates thought our culture beneath contempt.
Read REVOLUTIONARY ROAD for a revolution in the way you see, think, and feel.
But you won’t, because it might make you feel bad. Americans who live depleted lives avoid feeling even worse than they already do at all cost. Although they might watch the movie version to see Kate Winslet’s tits. (Is she nude in it? She must be.)
But despite reading it being mandatory if you’re a rare brave individual, realize that it’s NOT just a shit-list of America’s sociological faults.
It’s a soap opera.
It’s mainly one family’s story of accidental procreation, homemade abortion, plans of escape, dreary work and housework, wives who mow lawns, suburban busybodies (one character reminds me of – was it Mrs. Kravitz?? – a character on “Bewitched”), schmoozing, being polite to people you hate in order to get along, humoring children.
And it will change you in ways you need but do not want.
