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 مؤلّف الطّريق الثّوريّ يستحقّ الاهتمام
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'Revolutionary Road' Author Deserves Attention
The film version of "Revolutionary Road" has been touted as the first step in bringing the work of novelist Richard Yates to the attention of the world.
It's an admirable hope, because Yates is one of American literatures great unknowns -- a writer intensely, almost fanatically admired by other writers, but whose success in the marketplace has been distressingly dour.
But then, so was Yates' work. Few writers have so eloquently and yet so economically expressed a more unsparingly bleak view of modern life than Yates in his seven novels and two collections of short stories. "If my work has a theme," Yates said, "I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy."
The tragedy is that many of Yates' characters try -- oh, how they try -- to make some kind of connection, to find something they can truly share with another. Unfortunately, either this hoped-for connection is based on some fragile illusion -- as in "Revolutionary Road," and the main characters' belief that they are somehow meant for better things than domestic family life in 1950s suburban America -- or the object of their consideration is too caught up in his or her own wishes to notice anyone else.
Or, as Richard Price writes in the introduction to a new collection of Yates' work, "In Yates country, knowledge invariably ends in suffering, but none of his people are ever without hope -- they dream and they want, they endure and they yearn. In the beginning of things their eyes are wide as dishes. In the end, their longing will be the very knife that runs them through."
But what makes Yates so compelling is the way he tells his stories. The tone is calm, almost dispassionate; the language is clear and precise, never showy. It's all told with a quiet inevitability that makes its difficult to stop reading, even when the events being recounted are moments of pain and humiliation for the characters that the reader squirm in his or her chair. And you come away from his stories thinking that you know these characters better than you want to know yourself.
Granted, that isn't what a great many people would call a "fun reading experience." But the best novels and stories Richard Yates wrote in the course of his troubled, almost tragic life, are excellent examples of what the best literature does: It brings us in contact with humanity, gives us an understanding, an awareness about life and the way it is lived, that we can get no where else.
This is why Yates was never a popular success, and probably why he never will be. But for those who appreciate great writing and a more astringent view of the world, the Everyman Library's omnibus is the perfect introduction to his works.
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(عدل بواسطة زهير عثمان حمد on 02-28-2009, 02:25 PM)
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زهير عثمان حمد
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