on eleven kinds of loneliness by richard yates. a 12 hour flight from england to los angeles and all the world’s asleep; here i write, soaring through the sky, the night sky that has fused into the mosaic of 1950s america.
this book emanates the same air as the man on the cover – back straight, suit up, gentle smile; there is a warm sense of humility to within each story, and it has been long since i have been properly touched by the words on a page, yet eleven kinds of loneliness has managed to do just this for me, with every page bearing earnest hope that at last metamorphoses into a concoction of bitterness and fragile beauty and heart-wrench, the kind that lingers on your tongue long after it has been slowly devoured.
doctor jack-o’-lantern & the best of everything
the first two stories were not my favourite in the collection – doctor jack o’-lantern was a classic tale of the childhood desire to fit in, while the best of everything depicted not a loveless marriage, or an unhappy one, even; there was just the slightest, unexpressable emptiness present to the very end.
in doctor jack o’-lantern, vincent is given opportunity after opportunity to redeem himself in front of his classmates by miss price, his teacher, and time and again he disappoints us by telling yet another tale and committing yet another act that plummets his social status. still, disappointment is overshadowed with the inevitable pity for vincent that follows – his complete lack of social awareness and scrappy upbringing washes us over with sympathy.
here, vincent embodies a loneliness that is tinged with the frustration of not being understood, the helplessness of being ‘naturally different’ for there is a innate divide between his background and those of his more privileged classmates, and the isolation that comes with the large age-gap and teacher-student barrier between him and miss price – this is another element of loneliness because him being reduced to a child of concern implies that his relationship with miss price will never thrive, as much as he wants it to (to a societally-deemed inappropriate extent).
vincent isn’t just not understood – the fact of the matter is that nobody cares enough to try to understand him, and that is loneliness.
the best of everything did not stand out to me but it was nevertheless good. i appreciated how yates created this cheery, lively atmosphere to subtly contrast the invoiceable loneliness within grace, who has to uphold the façade and ideal of the perfect loving wife and accustom herself to her husband’s lifestyle.
jody rolled the bones
this was one of the most resonant stories. it’s more nuanced than i can articulate, and i thought this first epitomized yates’ astuteness. it took a while to get accustomed to the imagery of battle scenes but once my mind floated there i could already sense the loneliness of the soldiers being isolated, away from the world, serving the world. then within this, the loneliness of sergeant reece, self-induced yet with the best intentions. everything carries silently tragic undertones. i loved this so much, but i cannot tell you why.
no pain whatsoever
ah, the classic illness-driven loneliness. not a remarkable story but an adequate part of the collection. this depicts the dynamics of marriage, with tuberculosis creating difficult circumstances for both partners. when one is going through a serious disease, the other feels obligated to act content and not speak about their worries (their problems are supposedly rendered unimportant and unworthy in comparison). that is loneliness, balancing the weight of your own world silently, along with the expectation to constantly be there for your partner and to alleviate their pain.
i might have just not be concentrating enough but i thought the storyline and interwoven relationships between the characters were quite convoluted. it was not entirely clear to me whether there was cheating involved and who was with who – this wasn’t explicitly explained as well – and perhaps that was also yates’ intent, to conjure many bewildering interactions and then deprive them of true substance, so that there is a unresolved sense of emptiness which echoes the feelings of myra.
finally, the way myra’s mannerisms are presented to change depending on the people she is with reinforces the notion of how we are ultimately not acting for ourselves but for others. by choosing to ignore ourselves, we induce loneliness ourselves.
a glutton for punishment + a wrestler with sharks + fun with a stranger + the B.A.R. man + a really good jazz piano + out with the old
not going to give in depth commentary. i really, really liked a glutton for punishment, which encapsulated the looming distress in trying to sustain a lie which in turn attempts to sustain a façade of a stable job and a good husband.
there is a recurring theme in this collection of the loneliness that comes with the inability to express oneself due to the need to maintain a certain image / perceived expectation. underappreciation and misunderstanding are other motifs, reflected in real life as well, but the observation that all these causes of loneliness stem from our reliance on societal acceptance and validation just reinforces the preconceived notion that loneliness itself is never necessary as long as we become self-dependent creatures.
i have a strange relationship with external validation – if it really is intrinsically embedded within human nature then we shouldn’t try to reject it, yet embracing it makes us over-reliant on the unreliable opinions of others. it is a fragile balance that perhaps shall forever be teetering over the edge of my performative sanity. i digress.
builders
the quality of my review has deteriorated over time as i have become increasingly plagued by fatigue, but i did save the last story for the last just because it was too good to be dismissed or generalized into a pile like what i’ve done to the other stories. i fully did not expect to enjoy this story just because of how it was substantially longer than the rest of the collection and i anticipated a tedious read but left fulfilled and satisfied. i found the ending poignantly beautiful.
like the others, this isn’t a story that is excitingly enthralling or adorned with flowery embellishments; it is yates’ ability to twist our emotions by encapsulating the simple mundane in such a straightforward manner that i admire the most.
i loved the concept of the builders of literature and life so much and how he came back to it in the end, as well as the endearing hopefulness of bernie the cab driver that both compliments and comes into conflict with the dejected hopefulness of robert the writer. there is, once again, no true resolution at the end, but i don’t think i could have asked for a better ending in terms of his writing, not the plot. yates has all my respect.
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