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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fantastic writer, 12 Feb 2007
After reading Yates's Revolutionary Road i was keen to explore his other novels and Young Hearts Crying did not disappoint. This was Yates's penultimate novel but returns to the post war period to explore the failings and breakdown of another young couple's marriage. It is not suprising then that Young Hearts Crying has received much comparison to Revolutionary Road.
While many critics and readers (and even Yates's himself) acknowledged that he suffered from having written his best novel first (Revolutionary Road)his later work remains extremely impressive.
Young Hearts Crying tells the story of Michael and Lucy Davenport. Michael is a struggling writer who refuses to accept financial support from Lucy's sizable fortune and so the couple struggle financially while Michael desperately tries to establish himself and become a published poet.
What i love most about Yates is the way in which he creates characters who are lonely and vunerable and does not hesitate to spare the reader from confronting their lives. In Young Hearts Crying, Michael and Lucy try desperately to fit in with their 'arty' friends but despite their dogged efforts they remain on the fringes of these groups and never feel fully comfortable around them. The manner in which Yates portrays their desperation makes the reader cringe and you want badly for them to suceed but in Yates's fiction this is just not an option.
Yes... Yates can be bleak, and his characters can be desperately sad but he is a fantastic writer and one you will not regret exploring.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Yates the Great, 14 Mar 2006
This is another reissued stunner from Richard Yates, whose Revolutionary Road has become one of the great word-of-mouth successes of the past few years (only fifty years after first publication, and ten after his death).I liked Young Hearts Crying more than his other post-RR novels in print The Easter Parade or Cold Spring Harbor, mainly for its length - more than 400 pages of Yates to wallow in, what larks! Having said that, I can see how the third section of the book - which follows Michael Davenport - could be seen as a weaker link. Davenport is too obviously Yates and often he struggles to make him anything other than an autobiographical cipher: the alcoholism, the breakdowns and psychiatric admissions are all present. Nonetheless, every time I started to think along these lines, he would pull another great moment or entire scene out of the hat and all would be forgiven. The wide range of the book - covering parenthood, love, sex, art, and so on - made it special for me, even if that necessarily diluted the intensity of Easter Parade or Cold Spring Harbor. It even seems less bleak overall than some of his work - though that may just be me getting used to it... Buy this book, along with all his other work - half a dozen novels and two collections of stories: not much for a life, you might think, but when they're this good, who's complaining?
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond The Dream, 31 Jul 2006
In recent years doyens of the literary scene from Julian Barnes to Richard Ford and Nick Hornby have been proudly proclaiming their discovery of, and admiration for, Richard Yates. Lest you should be wary of the hype, be assured that here is writing of the highest quality.
Young Hearts Crying like so many of Yates' books is set in the decades immediately proceeding the Second World War and its cast of characters is drawn from the classes which people so much of his work-the young, college educated professionals who are distinguished from their peers not by their houses or jobs but their artistic and romantic idealism; their determination to be creative and to seek the society of like-minded souls who populate the lounges of genteel American suburbia. Yet just like another very different American master David Lynch, Yates discovers the material for high tragedy behind the most innocuous settings: seemingly perfect relationships are revealed as battlegrounds where individuals are more interested in self-discovery than each other, the promising young writer becomes yesterday's man, enduring friendships are revealed as tottering structures mounted on the twin pillars of mutual mistrust and thinly disguised contempt. In the wrong hands, such subject matter could become mere caricature, but Yates is a writer of the greatest perception who records the travails of his heroes and heroines with neither sentimentality nor indifference chronicling their lives as they unravel with a kind of undisputable logic so that events unfold with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
Despite being set in a very distinct historical time and place, the book transcends its context by focussing on the emotional struggles of its protagonists which have a timeless resonance. The character of Michael Davenport is a memorable creation of Yates' acerbic pen: the archetypal struggling writer who eschews his wife's vast fortune to maintain his artistic integrity whilst lacking the self confidence to achieve the recognition and independence he craves. The devastating portrayal of a man whose marriage and friendships are largely vehicles for exploring his own insecurities will be all too familiar to those who have entertained similar ambitions as will the figure of his wife Lucy, who starts her married life in the role of cheerleader but who grows in the book to discover her own needs and the disappointments in store as she tries to satisfy them. These figures are afforded complexity, vulnerability and humour and the supporting cast of friends, lovers and family are each worthy of attention in their own right.
Ultimately, much of the power of the book lies not in `the dissection of the American Dream' but in the exploration of worlds full of shattered idealism and romantic delusion where it takes people half a lifetime to learn that real life never quite matches up to the fantasy. No one traces this most prescient of journeys or its consequences as well as Yates: his lucid, economical prose and painfully honest dialogue live on in the memory long after the last page has been turned. Indeed, many may feel on finishing the book that they have read some extracts from their own lives. Yates is one of the genuinely important figures of post-war literature who merits the widest possible readership.
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