This isn't Yates' best work, although it begins strongly by throwing the reader into a tense situation. The protagonist, John Wilder, decides not to come home after a business trip. He calls his wife and tells her he can't do it anymore. She enlists one of his friends to go get him and bring him home, but instead his friend has him committed to Belleview hospital. At this point, the novel...
more This isn't Yates' best work, although it begins strongly by throwing the reader into a tense situation. The protagonist, John Wilder, decides not to come home after a business trip. He calls his wife and tells her he can't do it anymore. She enlists one of his friends to go get him and bring him home, but instead his friend has him committed to Belleview hospital. At this point, the novel has the potential to become another "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Yates himself seems to realize that his story could easily descend into cliche pretty quickly, and so he gets Wilder out of the hospital after only a couple chapters, but it is also at this point the novel becomes uneven. Wilder's relationship with his wife and son is not well fleshed out, so we don't really understand why he would leave them in the first place, or why he would continue to deceive them about his drinking and womanizing and general unhappiness. Why is he so unhappy? Is he just an alcoholic? A paranoid schizophrenic? Are we supposed to draw some deeper conclusion about the state of married life in the mid-20th century? I'm never really quite sure what to make of this book, and the rest of the story only confuses things more, as the plot diverges down an alley following Wilder to California with his mistress where they try to sell a script about his experiences in the mental hospital. Part of the problem is that Yates' female characters are mere caricatures. We don't get any sense of their inner life. Why a young woman like Pamela would waste so many years of her life with a drunk like Wilder is mysterious. What Wilder finds so unattractive about his wife Janice--a woman who is well-read and cultured and caring and whom he suggests he truly loved at one time--is also left mysterious. Without any objective perspective from the author, the reader is supposed to sympathize with a man who is really wholly unsympathetic. The only one I found any sympathy for was Janice, and I had to come to that sympathy by my own devices since the writer gave me little to go on. This is an easy read, and it's well-written in that straight-forward, mid-century style of Roth and Bellow and others. The dialogue is believable. The characters aren't fully grown, however, and this leaves a gaping hole in the story. Otherwise, it's worth reading if only for Yates' facility with dialogue and inimitable ability to portray the inner turmoil of men.
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