Lessons in Life

A Good School 

by Richard Yates

"'Dorset?' the man would say. 'Don't think I've ever heard of that one.'

And I can see my father starting to turn away then, concluding the pleasantries, lookin tired. He wasn't old that summer -- he was fifty-five -- but within eighteen months he would be dead.  'Well,' he would say, "as a matter of fact I'd never heard of it either, but it's -- you know -- it's supposed to be a good school.'" (p 8)

When I reviewed Richard Yates' novel Revolutionary Road I wrote that it was "a perfectly-written book" and "a modern classic in the true sense of the word." In his novel A Good School, published seventeen years later, I found a classic of a different sort in that I believe in this later work he captured a certain spirit of place and time perfectly. Even though the book did not seem to me as being perfect in writing style, the economy of Yates' prose still impressed me. Even more striking was his ability to convey the feeling of a certain time in the lives of a few representative boys while, at the same time, creating a pervasive feeling of an historic setting and place. The description of the school made clear it was unique among the prep schools of New England and that the small select group of boys that called it their home were just as unique in their own way. The awkward and nervous boy who becomes editor of the school newspaper is just one example of the different students that shared their school years at this good, if not unflawed, school. The awakening of character and the changes in the boys lives seemed to lead inexorably to an ending that made this novel and the titular school memorable.
Yates presented vignettes about the boys' social interactions, some of which seem mundane, but which cumulatively demonstrate the growth and change in their young lives. The drama of the real world with World War II always in the shadows is always impinging on the action and sometimes bursts in to interrupt. Thus the small world of the Dorset School seems to be sheltered from the world without until events of the world around it overwhelm the adolescent angst within it.
The result of reading this novel is to remind me that I must read more of Yates oeuvre as the experience is exhilarating.


A Good School by Richard Yates.  Picador, New York. 1978

Quality of Life

Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates

“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.”   ― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road




How do you describe what you have just experienced when you've just finished reading a perfectly-written book? Richard Yates' masterpiece, Revolutionary Road, is a modern classic in the true sense of the word. He captures life in the fifties and the ennui and longing that lay hidden behind the grey flannel suits and the white aprons. This book works on every level, just one being the way he successfully creates a central couple as protagonists and is able to provide, in a theme and variation style, two other couples whose lives in different ways mirror those of the central couple, the Wheelers - Jack and April. His writing style is effortless and deeply serious - in our book discussion the multiple connections to the poetry of T. S. Eliot were brought out as examples of the depth and complexity of the novel. Yates uses motifs with superb subtlety to provide a continuity that lasts throughout, even surviving the climactic finale.

What amazes me even more is that this was a first novel - it is unusual for the first novel of an author to be his best. I also find interesting that this novel was bested by Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a book that I personally like, for the National Book award in 1962 (Heller's Catch 22 was also a finalist). That suggests the quality of the competition in that year was very high (I wish I could say the same about every year). I found this to be a book that works well on many levels and one that I strongly recommend be read by all.


Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Everyman's Library. 2009 (1961)