Rating: 
Summary: I Can Scarcely Imagine a Better Job
Review: As a recent inductee to that lucky fraternity of readers whose pleasure it has been to read the work of Richard Yates, I was excited to discover that a large and impressive biography had been written about the man. And I am even more pleased to report that Bailey does his subject no disservice; with the same unflinching honesty and scalpel-sharp prose Yates demanded from himself and his students, Bailey catalogues the many trials and tribulations of Yates' life. Depressing as his life was, and as reprehensible and inscrutable as his behavior sometimes was, Yates still comes across as heroic in his dedication to his craft---and a likable, eccentric and sometimes demented curmudgeon to boot. Not only is Yates' occupation as a writer explored at length, but other important facets of his character are fairly represented, such as his tender dedication to his daughters and the terminal bachelordom of his later years. That such an excellent biography should be written about Yates ten years after his death is testament to this writer's legacy, and hopefully portends the long overdue resurgence of his stock among those of us to whom great literatue matters.
Rating:
Summary: A Moving Portrait of an Outstanding American Writer
Review: Beautifully written and thoughtfully conceived from start to finish, Blake Bailey's biography of the underappreciated American novelist and short story writer, Richard Yates, deserves considerable attention. Bailey does particularly well in situating Yates' life and work within the broader context of American literary and cultural currents of the time. If you don't know Yates' work, begin with his classic novel, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD. As you read his works, consult Bailey's biography for a more complete understanding of how Yates' difficult life informs his art.
Rating:
Summary: Richard Yates: The Novel
Review: Blake Bailey masterfully captures the sad life of Richard Yates. Yates' work was far more autobiographical than I had ever realized, and Yates himself -- his actions, the things he says -- often resembles a character from one of his own books. The haunting effect of this biography is that it reads, at times, like a lost Yates novel. This is the good new for Yates fans. The bad news is that Yates' life was even sadder than I had anticipated (and I had anticipated a very sad life). I have read much of the source material used in this book beforehand, and it is to Blake Bailey's credit that he synthesized it into something much more powerful and affecting than straight reportage: He has given us flesh and blood, Mr. Yates himself, a man as tragic as any figure in literature. Kudos to Mr. Bailey. This book should appeal to Yates' fans, as well as anyone who wants to read a gripping tale of an artist's troubled life.
Rating:
Summary: A surprisingly uplifting biography
Review: Blake Bailey's lucid and surprisingly uplifting biography draws attention to a much-admired but much-neglected novelist. Richard Yates's life was a relentless series of hopes, disappointments, and recoveries. Each time his life took another turn for the worse, he devoted himself more manically to his work.That work - seven novels including "Revolutionary Road," "Disturbing the Peace," and "The Easter Parade," as well as the short story collections "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness" and "Liars in Love" - has earned a lasting place in post-war American literature. In it Yates probed the flawed dreams of the middle-class. Each book was acclaimed for its craftsmanship and denounced for its bleakness. Sales were usually modest. Yates's first novel, "Revolutionary Road," appeared in 1961. Borrowing his blueprint from Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," Yates constructed the story of a Connecticut couple who are perilously dissatisfied with a 1950s variation of the American dream. In that book, Bailey writes, "deceptively simple language is like the glassy surface of a deep and murky loch. The first thing one may see is a rippled image of oneself, and then the churning shadows beneath." Yates was acquainted with murky depths. He was raised in New York City by an improvident and alcoholic sculptor who divorced his salesman father (once an aspiring tenor singer) in her dubious quest for artistic freedom. Drafted into the army as he graduated from high school in 1944, Yates never attended college. Always clumsy, Yates tried to prove his worth on a German battlefield by volunteering to be a runner even though he had pneumonia. Thus he permanently damaged his lungs and developed TB. After the war, with disability benefits, he quit a publicity job and went to France to learn to write. In this he emulated his hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was likewise intrigued by the tarnished romance of American ambition. Yates did teach himself to write. He also compounded his lung disease by smoking four packs a day and exacerbated his manic depression with alcohol. His nervous breakdowns became frequent and legendary. Physical and mental illness went hand-in-hand with stubborn irascibility that got worse as he aged, making it impossible for him to sustain a marriage or any of his liaisons with younger women, though he craved female companionship. Later, two of his three daughters kept their distance too, letting their contact lapse to Sunday morning phone calls when they knew Yates would be sober. He did most of his writing in the mornings as well. He lived in penury and squalor, but supported and educated his daughters by doing corporate publicity, teaching in universities, or writing screenplays and speeches. He died in 1992, leaving in his rental apartment freezer an unfinished novel about his stint as a speechwriter for Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The manuscript was the only object of value he possessed. Was Yates's art worth such suffering? Reading the biography of a troubled artist may allow saner people to feel superior, to adopt a position of relief that we have not been so burdened with talent. Bailey doesn't let us off with such an easy conclusion. With his intelligent respect for Yates's work, he grants us another way to look at the man: what would Yates have been without his writing, the one thing of which he was proud, the thing he could do extraordinarily well? Writing did not make Yates mentally ill - it saved him from total collapse. Bailey's excellent biography may do the same for its subject's reputation. (This review first appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.)
Rating: 
Summary: Tragedy, Indeed
Review: I haven't read this book, though I intend to soon and I've read everything (available) that Yates wrote. I asked Andre Dubus once what he thought of Yates. "He's a hee-RO!" Dubus responded, in his Southern drawl. He meant it. What happened to Yates was a travesty of letters, the kind of cruel and undeserved disregard that we like to think doesn't happen anymore. The same industry that dumped Yates lauds authors with a fraction of his talent and impact. Dubus was right on another point, which is quoted in this book: "Yates can never have too many readers, unless he has thousands and thousands of readers in many countries, and even that won't be enough."
Rating:
Summary: National Book Award
Review: In my opinion, Blake Bailey deseves the National Book Award for this work. If you're only going to read one biography of a writer in your lifetime, pick this one.
Thanks,
Don Pollock
Rating:
Summary: National Book Award
Review: In my opinion, Blake Bailey deseves the National Book Award for this work. If you're only going to read one biography of a writer in your lifetime, pick this one.
Thanks,
Don Pollock
Rating:
Summary: A surprisingly uplifting biography
Review: Richard Yates is not for everybody. To read Yates's novels and short stories is to be confronted with irrefutable evidence of the inescapable bleakness, futility, and self-delusion inherent in modern human existence. Most people prefer stories about anthropomorphic bunnies who get into danger -- light danger -- overcome it, and get home in time for supper. This is not surprising, given the inescapable bleakness, futility, and self-delusion inherent in modern human existence. But for masochists, lovers of exquisitely crafted and unforgettable prose, and those capable of receiving and accepting harsh truths (without committing suicide), reading the works of Richard Yates is a rewarding (if unarguably depressing) experience. The same is true of Blake Bailey's superb "A Tragic Honesty," the first biography of Yates. The book does full justice to its enigmatic subject, who died in relative obscurity and absolute penury in 1992. In the decade since, Richard Yates has come to exemplify the brilliant and tormented writer -- the "writer's writer," the consummate crafstman -- who achieves posthumously some of the recognition and adulation largely (and unfairly) denied him in life, rendering him, of course, all the more tragic. Getting rich and famous only after you're dead and can't enjoy it is quintessentially Yatesian; while Yates would have appreciated the irony, he probably would rather have had the cash. If there is cash now to be had, I'm glad it's going to Bailey and (I hope) Yates's heirs, his three beloved daughters. Like Claire Tomalin's excellent recent biography of Samuel Pepys, "A Tragic Honesty" is both aided and constrained by the writings of the subject himself. Every word of "fiction" Yates wrote was autobiographical, often painfully and obviously so, and not even Bailey, a skillful writer, would presume to tell Yates's story better than Yates told it himself in his work. Bailey ably weaves the lives of Yates's thinly-veiled fictional "characters" into Yates's own tragic private life, which included his shabby-genteel upbringing, his unheroic experiences in World War II, his hatred of and embarrassment over his irresponsible "artistic" mother (an amateur sculptor with delusions of grandeur), his sadness at the mediocrity of his father's life and work, his lifelong raging alcoholism, his mental instability and repeated hospitalizations, his lung problems (TB and emphysema), his need of and failure to get and hold onto money, and his abuse and alienation of all (and there were many) who sought to help or love him (including two wives and three daughters, various agents and editors, other writers, and many, many impressionable and adoring young coeds). While never declining into tedium himself, Bailey details the years of tedious and painstaking craftsmanship that went into the production of some of the most devastating prose ever written, especially Yates's masterpiece, his first novel, "Revolutionary Road." It's always helpful (and somewhat chastening) to be reminded that great books do not simply spring forth fully-formed from the heads and hands of great writers, but rather are often the product of years of anguished and uncompensated effort. Bailey's biography manages to capture all of the contradictions of the great man -- his good humor (usually when not smashed), his vicious cruelty (usually when smashed), his personal generosity, both to young writers and young women (and especially when the two were one), his love of his art, and his abiding anger at the humiliating and pointless writing jobs at which he toiled for years merely to pay his bills -- without resorting to caricature or rendering Yates anything less than fully human. Bailey has steeped himself in Yatesiana, and, with the assistance of many thoughtful and caring people who knew Yates, has given us a valuable portrait of one of the twentieth-century's most under-heralded writers. Buy and read Yates's books first, and then this one.
Rating:
Summary: A Superb Book, Worthy of Its Subject
Review: Richard Yates is not for everybody. To read Yates's novels and short stories is to be confronted with irrefutable evidence of the inescapable bleakness, futility, and self-delusion inherent in modern human existence. Most people prefer stories about anthropomorphic bunnies who get into danger -- light danger -- overcome it, and get home in time for supper. This is not surprising, given the inescapable bleakness, futility, and self-delusion inherent in modern human existence. But for masochists, lovers of exquisitely crafted and unforgettable prose, and those capable of receiving and accepting harsh truths (without committing suicide), reading the works of Richard Yates is a rewarding (if unarguably depressing) experience. The same is true of Blake Bailey's superb "A Tragic Honesty," the first biography of Yates. The book does full justice to its enigmatic subject, who died in relative obscurity and absolute penury in 1992. In the decade since, Richard Yates has come to exemplify the brilliant and tormented writer -- the "writer's writer," the consummate crafstman -- who achieves posthumously some of the recognition and adulation largely (and unfairly) denied him in life, rendering him, of course, all the more tragic. Getting rich and famous only after you're dead and can't enjoy it is quintessentially Yatesian; while Yates would have appreciated the irony, he probably would rather have had the cash. If there is cash now to be had, I'm glad it's going to Bailey and (I hope) Yates's heirs, his three beloved daughters. Like Claire Tomalin's excellent recent biography of Samuel Pepys, "A Tragic Honesty" is both aided and constrained by the writings of the subject himself. Every word of "fiction" Yates wrote was autobiographical, often painfully and obviously so, and not even Bailey, a skillful writer, would presume to tell Yates's story better than Yates told it himself in his work. Bailey ably weaves the lives of Yates's thinly-veiled fictional "characters" into Yates's own tragic private life, which included his shabby-genteel upbringing, his unheroic experiences in World War II, his hatred of and embarrassment over his irresponsible "artistic" mother (an amateur sculptor with delusions of grandeur), his sadness at the mediocrity of his father's life and work, his lifelong raging alcoholism, his mental instability and repeated hospitalizations, his lung problems (TB and emphysema), his need of and failure to get and hold onto money, and his abuse and alienation of all (and there were many) who sought to help or love him (including two wives and three daughters, various agents and editors, other writers, and many, many impressionable and adoring young coeds). While never declining into tedium himself, Bailey details the years of tedious and painstaking craftsmanship that went into the production of some of the most devastating prose ever written, especially Yates's masterpiece, his first novel, "Revolutionary Road." It's always helpful (and somewhat chastening) to be reminded that great books do not simply spring forth fully-formed from the heads and hands of great writers, but rather are often the product of years of anguished and uncompensated effort. Bailey's biography manages to capture all of the contradictions of the great man -- his good humor (usually when not smashed), his vicious cruelty (usually when smashed), his personal generosity, both to young writers and young women (and especially when the two were one), his love of his art, and his abiding anger at the humiliating and pointless writing jobs at which he toiled for years merely to pay his bills -- without resorting to caricature or rendering Yates anything less than fully human. Bailey has steeped himself in Yatesiana, and, with the assistance of many thoughtful and caring people who knew Yates, has given us a valuable portrait of one of the twentieth-century's most under-heralded writers. Buy and read Yates's books first, and then this one.
Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece
Review: This book is a masterpierce. I can scarcely comprehend the monomania that must have impelled Mr. Bailey to write such a meticulous and perceptive book.
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