Liars in Love: Stories

"Liars in Love," has seven solid stories from the late, great, Richard Yates. If you're familiar with Yates from "Revolutionary Road" or his other novels or short stories, you'll know that you're in for a bumpy ride with his cast of characters. Habitually reaching for a cocktail or lighting a cigarette, the Yates characters are never a happy lot. These stories are no excception. The stories are heavily autobiographical and coincide with much of the material in a terrific Yates biography, "A Tragic Honesty." The lead male charcaters (Jack Fields, Bill Grove, et. al) are all Yates at various stages of his life, from little boy in the first story to middle aged down on his luck writer in the final story. The two best stories are indeed the first, "Oh Joseph I'm So Tired," where his mother is once again the object of ridicule, and the last, "Saying Goodbye to Sally," which chronicles Yates' time in Hollywood when he worked on a screenplay for John Frankenheimer on a movie that was never made. A must if you're a Yates fan. For the uninitiated, you need to ask yourself if you like the later short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. If you do, take a chance. If you don't, this might not be the book for you.

While I'm happy that, bolstered somewhat by contemporary writers like Michael Chabon, Yates's stories haven't been relegated to extinction -- this book, along with his first collection (Eleven Kinds of Loneliness) and 8 or so previously uncollected stories, lives on in The Collected Stories of Richard Yates -- it's ludicrous to think that unless you're willing to search endlessly in dusty used bookstores (which I am, and indeed did) you can't purchase this book individually. I'm not going to claim that everything Richard Yates wrote was without flaw, because it seems to me that the stuff he wrote in his later years, when he became irremediably afflicted with tuberculosis, was pretty lugubrious, albeit with flashes of brilliance. But I think Liars in Love is unassailable.

Richard Yates remains an obscure, forgotten figure among other exceptional writers of the latter half of the 20th century, which is a shame because he deserves more attention. In his short stories and novels ("Revolutionary Road," "Young Hearts Crying" and "Easter Parade," among others), Yates shows us the world in all its ugly, desperate glory. His characters are never "heroes"--instead, their flaws reveal them to be just as selfish, self-absorbed and un-self-aware as we know we all can be, and often are.In "Liars in Love" (1978), Yates' aptly titled collection of short stories, the protagonists (and everyone else) fall into traps of their own making, telling themselves lies about their relationships with others which, more often than not, are merely convenient arrangements against despairing loneliness. Yates moves from a child's point of view in "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired," as he confronts his mother's failure to become the artist she believes herself to be, to an adult man's in "Saying Goodbye to Sally," whose brief affair with a woman becomes a symbol of his own mediocrity as a writer. Time and again, the characters fail to live according to their (and others') expectations. In "A Compassionate Leave," Paul Colby fails to lose his virginity as he wants so desperately to do; in "A Natural Girl," Susan's much-desired marriage to an older man fails to bring the desired happily-ever-after ending as she confronts his glaring shortcomings. In both stories, however, Yates leaves a shred of hope for the reader as the characters confront their failures and move on from them more self-aware, if only about the inevitability of human suffering.Yates' collection presents a varied look at the ugly underbelly of life that none of us likes to face. Yet his prose never falls into the trap of despair or hopelessness; rather, by revealing the dark, unmentionable parts of us that we hate to confront but know exist, the author allows us to admit to the lies we tell ourselves. Where we go from there he leaves up to us.

Richard Yates remains an obscure, forgotten figure among other exceptional writers of the latter half of the 20th century, which is a shame because he deserves more attention. In his short stories and novels ("Revolutionary Road," "Young Hearts Crying" and "Easter Parade," among others), Yates shows us the world in all its ugly, desperate glory. His characters are never "heroes"--instead, their flaws reveal them to be just as selfish, self-absorbed and un-self-aware as we know we all can be, and often are.In "Liars in Love" (1978), Yates' aptly titled collection of short stories, the protagonists (and everyone else) fall into traps of their own making, telling themselves lies about their relationships with others which, more often than not, are merely convenient arrangements against despairing loneliness. Yates moves from a child's point of view in "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired," as he confronts his mother's failure to become the artist she believes herself to be; to an adult man's in "Saying Goodbye to Sally," whose brief affair with a woman becomes a symbol of his own mediocrity as a writer. Time and again, the characters fail to live according to their (and others') expectations. In "A Compassionate Leave," Paul Colby fails to lose his virginity as he wants so desperately to do; in "A Natural Girl," Susan's much-desired marriage to an older man fails to bring the desired happily-ever-after ending as she confronts his glaring shortcomings. In both stories, however, Yates leaves a shred of hope for the reader as the characters confront their failures and move on from them more self-aware, if only about the inevitability of human suffering.Yates' collection presents a varied look at the ugly underbelly of life that none of us likes to face. Yet his prose never falls into the trap of despair or hopelessness; rather, by revealing to us the dark, unmentionable parts of us that we hate to confront but know exist, the author allows us to admit to the lies we tell ourselves. Where we go from there he leaves up to us.