John Updike and Philip Roth we know - but the great forgotten novelist of 20th-century America is Richard Yates. His debut, Revolutionary Road, was a critical success in 1961, but over the decades his books were neglected and Yates sank into alcoholism and nervous collapse. Now, with his work being reissued and a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet imminent, is this true visionary finally about to join the giants of American fiction?
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According to David Hare: 'Yates belongs with Fitzgerald and Hemingway as the three unarguably great American novelists of the 20th century. The highest compliment I can pay him is to say that he writes like a screenwriter, not like a novelist. He wants you to see everything he describes. Dramatic writers find novels unbearable because novelists mostly junk word on word, incident on incident... Yates describes everything with deadly precision, then goes on cutting everything closer and closer to the bone. He has a genuinely tragic sense, which comes out of an intense romanticism about the sensual things of life - cigarettes, drink, the opposite sex.' I agree with all of this except the sensuality. Can any Wasp writer truly be called sensual?
We all agree, however, that Yates's hour has come. A Yates revival is currently under way and some sort of commercial recognition appears imminent. His seven novels are being reissued. Later this year, a film of Revolutionary Road (part-financed by the BBC), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and directed by Sam Mendes, will be released in America (and in January 2009 in the UK)...
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