Anyone who aspires to write the Great American Novel should read Blake Bailey’s new biography of Richard Yates and think twice. By turns modest and affable, psychotic and raging, courteous to a fault and touchy to the point of derangement, this dapper, handsome, immensely appealing man could turn after a drink or two into the cruellest, most irrational, and abusive monster of paranoid monomania imaginable. The wonder is that this baffled self-tormentor, who razed a drunken path through life like a whiskey-fueled twister, wrote some of the coolest, most lucid, and magisterial novels and short stories of the past half-century. Even better, he gave us characters who live on in our imaginations with the poignancy of lost friends. Who can ever forget the desperately deluded mother of The Easter Parade with her ludicrous nickname (“Pookie”) and her thwarted artistic and social aspirations, or her undeluded but equally desperate daughter Emily whose life unravels so terribly in the final pages?

From Revolutionary Road, his justly acclaimed first novel of 1961, to the long overdue Collected Stories of 2001, Yates looked on all his subjects, however squalid and however sunny, with an equitable eye. What this cost him, especially with regard to his extravagantly selfish and destructive mother (nicknamed “Dookie”), whom he came to loathe and yet could not stop writing about, stands exposed in all its wincing minutiae in Bailey’s pages. Yates’s prose may be cool but, to his credit, he never affected the Olympian stance of, say, Joyce whose artistic god sat “paring his fingernails” before the spectacle of the world. Yates’s pitilessness of eye is a function of his compassion. He never stands above his personages. The pathos in his fiction always emerges from exact depiction. And it is the strange melange of his measured, calibrated, intentionally flat language with the most piercing, if unstated, empathy that makes his work almost unbearably painful to read.

The wonder is that this baffled self-tormentor, who razed a drunken path through life like a whiskey-fueled twister, wrote some of the coolest, most lucid, and magisterial novels and short stories of the past half-century.

It may seem faint praise to laud Yates’s equitable eye, but this is perhaps the rarest of writerly virtues. Chekhov, whom Yates revered, possessed it in abundance. And Chekhov’s dictum “The aim of fiction is absolute and utter honesty” might have been Yates’s own. Honesty to life, in all its manifestations, constituted Yates’s artistic credo; his unwavering loyalty to the truth, to “getting it right,” is apparent on every page. Whether he is describing a man tying his shoes or the sudden dissolution of a long-held hope, we immediately feel that yes, this is the way it must have been; those small accumulating recognitions underlie the sense of complicity we experience, however reluctantly, with his most forlorn and self-deceiving characters. In the end, we realize, Emily Grimes or Frank Wheeler or the schoolteacher Miss Price, blinded by her own well-meaningness (in the marvellous story “Dr. Jack-o’-Lantern” from Eleven Kinds of Loneliness), along with a host of others, are not that much different from ourselves; indeed, are in an uncomfortable sense ourselves. And Yates’s honesty, which was at once brutal and subtle, forms the noblest leitmotif in the long sorry tally of his days.

For the subtle side of his honesty, consider a passage from “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired,” one of his finest short stories, in which the narrator describes the courtyard where he and his sister are sent to play by their grandiose and scatty mother:

She always called the courtyard “the garden,” though nothing grew there except a few stunted city trees and a patch of grass that never had a chance to spread. Mostly it was bald earth, interrupted here and there by brick paving, lightly powdered with soot and scattered with the droppings of dogs and cats. It may have been six or eight houses long, but it was only two houses wide, which gave it a hemmed-in, cheerless look; its only point of interest was a dilapidated marble fountain, not much bigger than a birdbath, which stood near our house. The original idea of the fountain was that water would drip evenly from around the rim of its upper tier and tinkle into its lower basin, but age had unsettled it; the water spilled in a single ropy stream from the only inch of the upper tier’s rim that stayed clean. The lower basin was deep enough to soak your feet in on a hot day, but there wasn’t much pleasure in that because the underwater part of the marble was coated with brown scum.

If Philip Larkin was “deprivation’s laureate,” Richard Yates might aptly be termed “disappointment’s laureate.” The quiet force of the above passage turns on its opening phrase, in which the mother’s pretensions are glancingly alluded to. No comment on these is needed; the ensuing description says all. Its pathos arises from the fact that it is a child who is describing “the garden” in studiously neutral terms. We know, without being told, that the courtyard demarcates the boundaries of his possibilities and that the fountain stands, not as a symbol, but as a marble embodiment of all disillusion, then and in the years to come. And the “brown scum” with which the paragraph closes conveys a tactile sense of that disillusion; like all of Yates’s best touches, it makes us squirm a bit as we read. We recognize, with the narrator, what lies beneath “the underwater part of the marble.”

Yates’s best novels and short stories are filled with such masterly small effects. He is the most Flaubertian of our great novelists; just as Charles Bovary’s whole future dangles from the savage description of his unsuitable cap in the opening of Madame Bovary or the magical evocation of Emma’s parasol, in which all her beauty and delusion are shimmeringly mirrored, so too, in Yates’s fiction, plain, mute objects stand as complex witnesses and emblems of his characters’ unarticulated destinies. Symbols were anathema to Yates—Bailey documents his distaste well—and the things that surround and accompany his characters are never symbolic but function somewhat like choruses in ancient tragedy, confirming and crystallizing what we know but the protagonists do not.

Bailey’s biography of Yates is neither heartening nor pleasant to read. The story he has to tell is simply too gruelling. If his two favourite adjectives on page after page are “boozy” and “roach-infested,” it is hard to know, in all fairness, how he might have varied them, given Yates’s habits and living conditions. As a minute and obsessively detailed depiction of the “foul rag-and-bone shop” from which our Yates’s ladder started, the biography is certainly indispensable; yet, in all candor, I found myself wondering whether I really wanted or needed to know so much about each of Yates’s catastrophic collapses—not only the roaring binges and tantrums but the spells of amnesia, of outright insanity, the ugly and oblivious mistreatment of lovers, friends, and family, the sheer demoniac progress of Yates’s own unrelenting self-demolition. Hardly a page is without its explosive cough, duly documented, resulting from Yates’s four-pack-a-day smoking habit (even when fitted with an oxygen tank for a collapsed lung and emphysema, he insisted on smoking); confronted by his daughter on the dangers of his habit, especially in the vicinity of oxygen, Yates snapped, “Media hype.” Yates’s alcoholism may have been in a class of its own; spirituous fumes seem to rise from the page as one staggers down the stages of yet another of his bibulous bouts, the sight of which would have driven even Pantagruel to the nearest AA meeting.

One would expect such an account to inspire pity and terror and in other hands it might have done so. Blake Bailey writes briskly and clearly (though one imagines how Yates might have reacted to sentences like “As the clouds of puberty gathered around him, he began to resent his life”). Moreover, he is admirably assiduous and has interviewed almost everyone who befriended Yates; he knows the work inside and out, including unpublished drafts and manuscripts. He has selected a superb range of photographs which graphically detail Yates’s physical decline from stunningly handsome youth to hunched decrepitude. No gin bottle or cigarette butt has been left unturned in this wretched inventory, and yet something larger seems missing. In a nice turn of phrase, Bailey terms Yates a “grimly precise writer” but the description would apply better to his biographer. Yates is often grim and precise but he is also much more than that; even in his most dispassionate “omniscient narrator” mode, Yates’s omniscience has a broken-hearted feel. In reading A Tragic Honesty, one cannot help but feel the sharp disjunction between Bailey’s breezily clinical manner and the excruciating details of the tale he has to tell. At moments this produces a certain inadvertent, rather Nabokovian, humor; thus, when Bailey attempts to “talk the talk” and incorporate Yates’s own self-description, he stumbles, as here: “The man seems to have taken pity on Yates, though his typical mood toward the forlorn fuckup was, apparently, exasperation.” Come again? Though it isn’t really Bailey’s fault—he isn’t Yates and doesn’t pretend to be—the effect of such disjunctions over so long a book is to make Yates appear, with his lofty and frustrated ambitions and impossible expectations, like a crusty and blustering Don Quixote saddled by a Sancho Panza with a spread-sheet.

That said, there are many wonderful episodes recounted here, especially from Yates’s earlier years. The whole account of “the good school” (which Yates was later to evoke in A Good School of 1978, one of his best novels) is interesting and often hilarious. Avon School, in the Connecticut woods, which Yates attended from 1939-1944, had been founded by a wealthy eccentric named Mrs. Riddle who was given to such edifying maxims as “A slovenly, slouching lad is pleasing to no one.” There Yates became editor of The Avonian and art director of the school yearbook named (really!) The Winged Beaver. Mrs. Riddle had adopted this improbable beast as the school mascot in accord with her philosophy, which Bailey wittily summarizes thus: “No matter how modest one’s abilities, if one persevered like a certain tenacious long-toothed rodent, then there were no heights to which one could not aspire.”

From The Winged Beaver there might seem to be no way to go but up. In fact, his school years may have been among Yates’s happiest. Even when his one undisputed success occurred with the publication of Revolutionary Road, he was in St. Vincent’s Hospital recovering from booze-induced mania. Success and failure haunted Yates; though utterly inept at negotiating the shark-thick eddies of the New York publishing world, he persisted intrepidly, the victim of bad luck as much as of his own ineptitude. A life-long ambition, for example, was to have a short story accepted by The New Yorker, and he seems to have been inconsolable when this never transpired. With hindsight we can say that the loss was The New Yorker‘s rather than Yates’s, but to him such consolation would have been meaningless. He was obsessed with prizes, reviews, awards, and fellowships. Envious and bitterly resentful of more successful contemporaries such as Saul Bellow and John Updike, he seems to have been poisoned by literary rancor as much as by alcohol. In fact, all comments on Yates’s career tend to agree in proclaiming him “unjustly neglected” and “long overdue for recognition,” etc. I have shared this opinion since first reading Revolutionary Road thirty or so years ago; however, after immersing myself in Bailey’s biography, I have to wonder whether any amount of acclaim would ever have been enough for Yates: his thirst for renown seems to have quite as intense as his thirst for bourbon and about as unquenchable.

That Yates knew disappointment intimately and that he suffered every gradation of disillusion in the cruellest and most personal way is no doubt part of what gives his fiction its incomparable authenticity; the other, and greater, part, of course, is his astonishing skill at his craft. Yates was quite definite in considering himself a “realist” and certainly he succeeds almost better than anyone else in making us see and feel and smell the narrow and harrowing world of his characters. But in reading and re-reading his work I have come to wonder whether Yates is not considerably more than a realistic chronicler of American society over the past forty or fifty years. In fact, the more I read him, the more he reminds me of Kafka; though an utterly secular Kafka, to be sure.

Yates’s characters, like Kafka’s, are all enmeshed in the toils of unreasonable or misplaced hopes. Hope is the poison on which they eagerly feed and on which they sicken and die, usually with intolerable slowness. But if false hope, or “hope for the wrong thing,” as Eliot put it, kills them in the end, hope also gives them a certain feisty and intractable stamina. Like Josef K. in The Trial or the unnamed protagonist “before the Law,” they never surrender their tightly clutched expectations. And Yates, again like Kafka, is a master of embarrassment, of that slowly twisting embarrassment from which we cringe and step back. In Kafka, shame is always a spectacle; onlookers stare through the windows or mill about the once-private bedrooms in which his hapless figures lie abruptly exposed. At the end of The Easter Parade, the sudden disintegration of Emily Grimes before the smooth, spiffy, well-buffed veneer of her nephew’s perfect suburban life induces the sickening sensation all uncontrollable humiliations inspire. The numerous small expectations that have poisoned Emily’s failed life erupt in a display of venom, and we flinch. Just as Kafka projected intense anxieties and private dreads into the humdrum actual of social life, so too does Yates: what we most fear for ourselves actually happens to Yates’s characters. They are exposed as failures and see their most secret hopes dragged out into the daylight. Exposure is ruin in Yates’s world, for it blocks all escape routes, and yet exposure is inevitable and horribly exact. “There was no way out,” repeats the ape trained as a human in Kafka’s “Report for the Academy.” For the men and women and children in Yates’s work there is no way out either and it is their gradual or abrupt realization of this that provides both the drama and the heartbreak of his tales.

Yat’e is thirst for renown seems to have quite as intense as his thirst for bourbon and about as unquenchable.

Yates perfected the techniques of realism not merely to give us the look and smell and feel of the world but also—again, like Kafka—in order to lift his stories to the level of fable. There is a point at which the most lovingly and stubbornly crafted realism touches the hallucinatory and it seems to me that Yates achieves this over and over again. If his stories live on in us and recur like our own most hurtful remembrances, that is because he arrived by painstaking fidelity to the actual at something deeper and more lasting than the surfaces he so faithfully rendered. In Bailey’s biography, Yates comes across as a tragic bungler in almost every aspect of his life; his delusions were colossal, his attempts at evasion botched. Only his clearsightedness—and only at his writing desk—remained inviolable to the end. If the power of his fictions lies in the cunning complicity with which they involve us in lives that appear small, mean, deluded and doomed, that is because, like all enduring fables, they are our lives as well or, at the very least, the lives we fear may be ours.