- Hardcover: 178 pages
- Publisher: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence; 1st edition (1978)
- ISBN-10: 0440032466
- ISBN-13: 978-0440032465
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 903,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
A Good School (Vintage Classics)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A Good School is a semi-autobigraphical novella/slim book that has much to recommend it. It is Yates doing what he does best: describing in spare, economical prose the fragile often wounded psyches of a group of American boys and their teachers: the storyline is deceptively simple but utterly absorbing. Like so much of Yates' writing this is a little gem with its exquisitely honed prose, the deliberate understatement of emotion only serving to highlight the underlying agonies and confusion of impressionistic youth. It is not my favourite book by Yates but it has much to recommend it.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A Good School follows the lives of various characters from a group of (mostly) WASP school boys at a New England prep school in the years leading up to, and directly following Pearl Harbour. It covers similar themes to other prep school stories such as Catcher In The Rye and has a strong sense of pathos running through much of the book. A Good School is under 170 pages long so it's not an epic multi-layered story, it is however a beautifully crafted book, the prose is very tight and there's not a word out of place.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The most autobiographical novel of an author who specialises in such an approach to fiction, A Good School is not the best book by Yates but is still better than most. For those of you not yet familiar with this superb writer, can I urge you to lose no more time in discovering him? Actually this is no mean place to start an exploration of his oeuvre for although published in 1978, it takes as its inspiration Yates's own school days in the early to mid forties and much can be learnt of the author and his later preoccupations from this fictionalised account. In elegant and effortless prose Yates quickly paints a world and a cast of characters which you very rapidly find yourself caring about, the human perception and emotional honesty which typifies all his writing is here in spades. The best trick of the book is the skill with which Yates manages to evoke that dualistic approach many of us adopt in looking back on our schooldays-which as here can often be riven with feelings of inadequacy, bullying, struggles for status and personal tragedy-yet somehow still coating them with the haze of nostalgia for a lost idealism and the energy of youth. In Yates's unsentimental hands teachers and boys live and hurt, learning that the certainties of youth are anything but: school offering a glimpse of a troubled future. Recommended to all and as a stepping stone to the great Revolutionary Road and Young Hearts Crying
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A lesson for so-called critics
Those reviewers who have supported the often dreary and unreadable book prize winners over the last few years should be force fed Richard Yates to discover what real writing is all... Read more
Published 9 months ago by P. C. Langman
Richard Yates - A Good School
Richard Yates novels break you down. Every one of them has brought me to tears. They're so perfectly, precisely written, with not a word wasted or in the wrong place. Read more
Published 21 months ago by RachelWalker
Beginning of a fine career.. too bad it ended so early.
There is a Yates revival on right now, and very good. This is the third one from Vintage Classics of the UK of this fine, now dead American writer that I have bought on Amazon UK. Read more
Published on 31 Mar 2009 by Wayne Lee Stedman
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