(page 143 paperback)

"Oh now, don't be silly," he tolld her, allowing his voice to grow heavy and rich with common sense..."

I think the certifiable lunatic is the Yates's representation of repressed truth : if we acknowledge the banality and foolishness of our many of our values and choices, what would we do then? What justification could we give ourselves and others for what we are doing? What disorder would be released upon our worlds from by truth-tellers like John Givings?

but in the end, she isn’t strong. She just checks out. Now, it she’d taken the kids and left Frank….! (Can you tell I’m still not sure about this “strongest”thing?)

(Page 276) Wouldn't it be all right if we sort of didn't talk about anything? she asked. I mean couldn't we just sort of just take each day as it comes, and do the best we can, and not feel we have to talk about everything all thie time?

(page 326: the last chapter in the book):

His role during these recitals [of the Wheelers] was to sit and stare gravely at the carpet, occasionally shaking hiw head or flexing his bite, until she cued him to make certain small corroborations.

...and he waited for what he guessed would be a transition from laughter to weeping--that was what usually happened in the movies---

...he may go from strength to strength in the life of perfect service

She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parenta nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

Does she really believe this: "That’s what came of good intentions—Try to love your child, and you helped to bring about another mother’s death." Does she truly feel responsible for April’s death? Does she love her child?

Sisyphus, a legendary king of Corinth, reputed the most cunning of mankind. When Autolycus, another master of roguery, stole his neighbors’ cattle and changed their appearance so as to avoid detections, Sisyphus was able to pick out his own, having marked them under their hoofs. It is also related that when Death came to take him, the crafty Sisyphus chained him up; so that nobody died till Ares came and released Death again.

For misdeeds on earth, variously related he was condemned in Hades to roll to the top of a hill a large stone, which when it reached the summit rolled down again, so that his punishment was eternal.---Oxford Companion to Classical Literature

Because Richard Yates, in his quiet way, remains one of the most subersive writers I know. Critics have pointed out that Yates subverted the American character in his fiction, and it’s true that there’s much the author found empty and even harmful in American institutions and American culture. But it’s not just our “American” character that Yates lays bare in these stories. It’s our deepest human nature.

Peel away the carefully constructed layers of self-deception, and we discover that too often we’re all simply horse traders, eager to move up in the world by swapping a shabby job, house, friend, spouse, even child, for a newer, better one. It’s being traded, or knowing that we would be traded if we could be, that on occasion allows Yates’s characters to see things in what one of them calls ‘the clear light of self-hatred.”

Such brutal insights, I suspect, along with what Yates’s former student and friend, the writer Robert Lacy, has referred to as his “seemingly congenital inability to sugarcoat, “ that may be the reason Yates never sold well in life and why, for a time, at least, his fiction has been allowed to slip out of print.

And it’s also probably the reason some critics have wistfully regretted the fact that the stories hold out so little hope, even accusing Yates of reveling in the failures his characters must endure. There may be some truth to the charge.

The excitement one feels reading these dark stories, I believe, is the exhilaration of encountering , recognizing, and embracing the truth. It’s not a pretty truth? Too bad. That we recognize ourselves in the blindness, the neediness, the loneliness, even the cruelty of Yates’s people will have to suffice.

Indeed, Yates suggests, it may even be this worst of night terrors- of ending up alone in the world and trying to smile—that is responsible for our most tragic human blindness, our eager willingness to confuse what is true with what we want to be true.

In the end I think it is Yates’s relentless, unflinching investigation of our secret hearts, and his speaking to us in language as clear and honest and unadorned and unsentimental and Uncompromising as his vision, that makes him such a great writer.

...to dry them seemed as Sisyphean as to repair the things wrong with his parrents' house. The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.

"It mattered to her that Europe be European. She'd visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she'd had her fill of the place."

It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive.

The kitchen and dining room were ablaze in light, and there appeared to be a small boy slumped over the dining-room table, his face on his place mat. The scene was so wrong, so sick with Revenge, that for a moment Alfred honestly thought the boy at the table was a ghost from his own childhood.

And if you sat at the dinner table long enough whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.

I think Franzen is focusing upon how family life drives us away from the values and expectations of our own parents, a phenomenon more peculiar to our generation and to those that have followed us. I think when Yates was writing Revolutionary Road the importance of continuity in family life and in other circumstances of a child’s environment was taken for granted.

Franzen seems to be saying that escaping from those influences is more important for many individuals

. Chip and Denise are the escape artists in this work; Gary is the child bent upon “correcting” his father’s life in the sense that he doesn’t want to replicate it with his own family, and ironically he is the one promoting the values of his mother. So he isn’t really correcting the patterns he has been subjected to; he’s defying Alfred, but he’s not really escaping anything. (Notice how his own youngest is striving to be a parent-pleaser, as Gary himself was when he was a child?

"....Instead, the eerily timely "Bel Canto" was published in May, and yesterday came the happiest ending of all: The book won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

The novel edged out four other finalists: "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen, "Sister Noon" by Karen Joy Fowler, "The Hunters" by Claire Messud and "The Death of Vishnu" by Manil Suri.

Patchett receives $15,000 -- the largest peer-juried prize for fiction in the United States -- and the finalists each take home $5,000. All five writers will be honored May 11 at the 22nd annual ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library."