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From: J Category: Art Date: 11 January 2007 Time: 02:03 PM Review: A pessimistic friend of mine gave me Yates's collected short stories, and I wasn't surpised, when I read them two years later, to find an unhappy ending world view. We choose books to confirm our personality. The stories have a tough charm: coughing unheroic veterans, couples arguing, poor parents, the mean relationships of kids. I decided to go forth into the novels. His best was his first: Revolutionary Road, artistic illusions of a young couple constantly thwarted by a lack of bravery, they never get to France, of course, and it ends badly, of course. Small dreams broken. Or something like that someone said on the cover of one of them. A pissy Fitzgerald for the 1950s. Yats never got really famous (was depressed, an alcoholic, divorced). How's that for irony. It makes sense, I had to force myself to keep reading his novels, a good school, easter parade etc, because I suppose I like books which make me feel good. Obviously this miserableness may have something to do with Yates' lack of enormous popular success. And sometimes the bitterness seems like a kind of sentimentality , a distortion, a fake emotion. The prose has a bit of hemingway woodenness too. But the miserable bastard is a discovery, read him on rainy days with a tub of icecream.