As blown away as I was with his novel, The Easter Parade, I was disappointed with Richard Yates’ short story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, which is a themed collection about characters who are isolated in different ways. I didn’t love any of the stories but I appreciated and enjoyed some aspects of five of them.
Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern is about a new kid in school whose teacher takes pity on him. No Pain Whatsoever is about a woman visiting her injured veteran husband in hospital, concealing from him that she’s having an affair. A Glutton for Punishment is an odd tale about a man who’s made a career out of getting fired - but doing so with a kind of panache. A Wrestler with Sharks is about a hack writer who thinks he’s amazing despite working at a nothing trade paper. Builders is about a wannabe Hemingway who writes up the everyday life of a New York cabbie with strange aspirations for becoming rich and famous off of them.
Yates convincingly and astutely captures the subtleties and complexities of human behaviour throughout. The stories provide a snapshot of life in post-war America and are unique, well-written and appear deeper than they are. In the same breath, I didn’t find them interesting enough to want to re-read them and uncover the deeper layers of the material.
I won’t go into the remaining six stories but I didn’t find them memorable or contain anything compelling to them - they came off as dated and unremarkable.
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is a very literary collection - cerebral and artistic - but for all that I found that its lack of engaging stories made it an unfortunately tedious read. Yates is an exceptional writer but I would recommend his long fiction like The Easter Parade over his short fiction.
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