Dismembering the American Dream
The Life and Fiction of Richard Yates

Kate Charlton-Jones (Author), DeWitt Henry (Foreword by), Monica Yates (Afterword by)

9780817358594

Paperback / softback, published 15 March 2016

296 pages, 14 black & white illustration
22.6 x 14.9 x 2.5 cm, 0.449 kg

The close reading of Yates’s fiction is enhanced and enabled by an awareness of how his own turbulent and unhappy life was explored and reflected in his work. Charlton-Jones’s research is impressive, as is her ability to apply it in a focused and acute way. Enthusiasm for her subject occasionally undermines the authority of her critical voice, with the occasional slip into a conversational tone. But Dismembering the American Dream is an impressive piece of scholarship, redeeming Yates from misunderstanding and neglect."" —Times Literary Supplement

Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature

Since his death in Alabama in 1992, the work of American writer Richard Yates has enjoyed a renaissance, culminating in director Sam Mendes’s adaption of the novel Revolutionary Road (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet). Dismembering the American Dream is the first book-length critical study of Yates’s fiction.

Kate Charlton-Jones argues that to read Yates’s tales of disordered lives is to uncover not misery, though the lives he describes are sad ones, but a profound, enriching, and humorous understanding of human weakness and vulnerability. Yates’s narratives absorb his readers so entirely, mirroring their own emotional highs and lows with such skill, that reading becomes recognition. Yates demonstrates his ability to tease powerful human drama out of the most ordinary, quotidian moments. At the same time, Yates’s fiction displays an object lesson in the art of fine prose writing, so it is no surprise that many early fans of Yates were also established writers.

Charlton-Jones explores how Yates extends the realist form and investigates three main recurring themes of his fiction: observations about performative behavior, which are at the heart of all his fictions; his conception of the writer’s role in society; and how he envisages the development of social and sexual relationships. Furthermore, Charlton-Jones illustrates how Yates incorporates some of the concerns and methods of postmodernist writers but how, nevertheless, he resists their ontological challenges.

Drawing on the author’s personal papers and with a foreword by DeWitt Henry and an afterword by Richard Yates’s daughter Monica, Dismembering the American Dream provides an extended critical examination of the often neglected but important work of this gifted and accomplished author.