Hitch on Yates

• Christopher Hitchens reviews Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road in The Atlantic Monthly (via Powell's).

Frank and April Wheeler are the reverse of the unhappy family in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard. They have already tasted the fruits and sweets of the big city, and qualified as urban -- perhaps better say urbane -- sophisticates. But you know how it is. Pregnancy comes to April a teeny bit earlier than had been anticipated (or desired), and the distressing need to earn some actual money is then imposed upon Frank, who must martyr his aestheticism to the brute requirements of "the firm." Soon enough the days become regulated by the commute and, of course, by the needs of the children.

Even so, the lost Bohemia of their Greenwich Village period will not be denied, and before too long Frank and April are smilingly condescending to help out a local troupe called, with brilliant ominousness, the Laurel Players. They decide to build up the spirit of community theater with a production of "The Petrified Forest." I shall simply say that I don't remember ever feeling so sorry for a set of fictional characters. If Yates had one talent above all, it was for conveying the feeling of disappointment and anticlimax, heavily infused with the sort of embarrassment that amounts to humiliation. As the full horror of the first night, and the full catastrophe of April's own performance, become apparent, Yates catches the ghastly moment by writing, "The virus of calamity, dormant and threatening all these weeks, had erupted now."

Of no world but his own

• Nick Fraser on Richard Yates in The Guardian.

America has always abhorred failure, punishing its exponents in a variety of ways. For Yates's postwar generation of literary overachievers, the rewards were much greater than ever before and perhaps because of this, the cost of failure proved to be high. Yates belonged to no literary faction and he hated the world of reviewing and literary fashion. He declined to call himself a realist, suggesting that all novels came 'filled with techniques'. In the surviving, somehow inevitably poor recordings of Yates available on the internet, his booming, distracted voice tells us that he is merely following the example of the writers he loves - Scott Fitzgerald and Flaubert. 'The emotions of fiction are autobiographical,' he observes, 'but the facts never are.'

Yates's problem wasn't just blackness of vision, but persistently bad timing. His books appeared either passé when they dealt with the time in which he was growing up or dangerously at odds with prevailing wisdom. Criticising the shallowness of American corporate life was one thing, so long as it was done with appropriate sententiousness. To imply that, far from pursuing the approved dream, executives in corporations didn't really do much work, was something not even Jack Lemmon could have conveyed to the American public in Yates's heyday.

Quiet desperation, onscreen

• Blake Bailey details Richard Yates' battles with Hollywood in Slate.

Bailey wrote a recent bio of Yates that I now want to read. The backstory behind the film of Revolutionary Road is pretty interesting, likely more so than the eventual movie will be; with Sam Mendes behind the wheel and Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the main roles, there is the danger of it being one of those airless, cold "prestige" movies that are overstuffed with talent and stinking to high heaven with awards lust. (The Hours, anyone?)

Don't get me wrong: Yates is an amazing writer and Revolutionary Road is a damn good book. But it doesn't have all that much to say about domestic ennui that hasn't become obvious; back in '61 it was probably pretty cutting stuff but these days, its sexual politics are a bit prehistoric and by its end it teeters on the edge of melodramatic moralizing. Yates' style, however, is what really makes the book sing. He's got one of those ruthlessly precise prose styles that's straight and clear and practically surgical, like Carver when he's really rolling but without the gently empathetic undertone.

If they really wanted to tackle something in the same subject area that's challenging and disturbing, they'd go after Joseph Heller's Something Happened. But I'm not really sure how you'd make a film of that book that wouldn't drive people straight out of their minds.

When the novel was first published in 1961, a few people in Hollywood came to the same conclusion, including director John Frankenheimer, who realized it was just the sort of arty, uncompromising vision he wanted to bring to the screen as the industry's foremost wunderkind. Cooler heads prevailed, and he proceeded to make "The Manchurian Candidate" instead. But meanwhile he'd bought rights to Lie Down in Darkness, by William Styron, who recommended none other than his friend Dick Yates to write the screenplay. Yates was then living in a ghastly basement apartment in Greenwich Village, and he could hardly believe his luck. Before he knew it, he was sucking down bullshots in Malibu with Frankenheimer, who told him, by God, that he wanted a rigorously faithful adaptation of Styron's novel and damn the censors!

Yates took him at his word and wrote an adaptation that would have amounted to a great movie adapted from a semigreat novel. Natalie Wood and Henry Fonda were ready to star as Peyton and Milton Loftis, whereupon Yates would receive (as he put it) "an avalanche of money." Then poof! Wood's agent decided it would tarnish her image to appear as the quasi-incestuous daughter of Henry Fonda, and United Artists pulled the plug. Yates went back to his vermin-infested apartment. "God, it's good," Frankenheimer said 40 years later of Yates' screenplay. "I'd still like to make that movie."