Take on life (traits that can be traced, in their view, to Of his work, pointing to his plain, unobtrusive prose and to his bleak The latter's lapsed reputation and the unavailability (until now) These writers have long and eloquently regretted Wolff, Richard Russo, Richard Ford, and Jayne Anne Phillips-whoĬonsider themselves to have been fathered by Hemingway and, as it were,īrought up by Yates. Writers-from Raymond Carver through Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, Tobias Influence on the style and sensibility of an entire line of Strangely, you won't ever hear Yates mentioned in connection Wrought exert the same power over the characters' destinies thatĮconomic forces did in Norris's McTeague or Theodore Dreiser's Yates's fiction, childhood and adult memories of what parents Of free will back to the crisis of determining circumstances. That is to say, he brought American fiction from the drama The Hemingway track back to the Frank Norris track, from realism back to Portraying charactersĪrrested by their personal histories, mired in memory and thus destinedįor the most irrationally self-defeating action, he shifted fiction from It was Yates, in fact, who introduced intoĪmerican fiction the theme of inertia as catalyst. Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade-fits nicely into all this His collected short stories-along with the republication of
Novelist and short-story writer Richard Yates, and so the publication of The inescapability of the past was a thematic obsession of the Present, we compulsively return to the past, which has the effect ofĮclipsing the present, which makes us return to the past. WeĪre caught in a cycle more inane than vicious. In fact our indiscriminate homage to it can be a form of disrespect. We adore the past so intensely that we refuse to let it die, but Americans disrespect the past? YesĪnd no. Successfully makes its way through litigation) of Gone with the Wind,Īnd at least three small publishers bravely dedicated to reprintingįorgotten works by forgotten authors. There's The Golden Bowl on film, a rewrite (if it Producers, also on Broadway, and a revival of Hair (can you imagine?)
Had Jane Eyre the musical, recently on Broadway, a stage revival of The (and drawing on their parents' professional connections). Ubiquitous memoirists retrieving their early lives, and the songs barelyĪ decade old being remixed, and the children of famous writers andĭirectors and entertainers taking up their parents' occupations The Culture of Retrieval is inescapable today. 2001 Harper's Magazine Foundation 26 May.
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