Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates

I’ve written before about Richard Yates, a writer with an innate ability to understand his characters’ failings and self-delusions, portraying the bitter cruelty of their dashed dreams with real insight and humanity. In this, his penultimate novel, Yates offers us another riff on this theme by focusing on a young couple, Michael and Lucy Davenport, just starting out on their lives together in 1950s New York.

While Lucy’s family are very wealthy, Michael refuses to live off his wife’s money, preferring instead to pursue his ambitions as a writer, supplementing his income with a mindless job in a publishing house. At the start of the novel, Michael and Lucy seem very much in love with one another, but all too soon the marriage begins to stagnate and sour. Michael generates some interest in his work with an early collection of poems – particularly his best piece ‘Coming Clean’ – however, he struggles to repeat the success. Meanwhile, Lucy is becoming increasingly frustrated with their second-rate living conditions, knowing full well that her fortune could buy them a more comfortable lifestyle. Comparisons with their friends, the Nelsons, only make matters worse for the Davenports, particularly given Tom Nelson’s success as an artist with pieces in some of the leading galleries in New York.

By the end of the first section of this three-part novel, the Davenports’ marriage is over, leaving Michael with little idea of what to do next.

He left the house, slamming the kitchen door, and made his way up past the extravagance of Ben Duane’s flower beds. But once he was at his desk he couldn’t lift a pencil or even see straight. He could only sit with half his fist in his mouth, breathing hard through his nose, trying to comprehend that the bottom had dropped out of everything. It was over.

He was thirty-five, and he was as frightened as a child at the thought of having to live alone. (pp.116-117)

In the second and third sections of the novel, we learn what happens to Lucy and Michael following the split. Lucy fares better than Michael in this respect, pursuing various creative activities in an effort to find herself. As the months slip by, Lucy dabbles in acting, taking the role of Blanche DuBois in a local production of A Streetcar Named Desire; she joins a creative writing class, drawing on some of her own experiences to produce some promising short stories; finally, Lucy tries her hand at painting, but with limited success – in truth, her works are naïve and amateurish. There are various affairs and relationships along the way, most of which are short-lived, just like her passionate liaison with Jack Halloran (aka Casimir), the enigmatic director of the theatre group.

Later still, when she lay on her bed and gave in at last to the kind of crying Tennessee Williams described as “luxurious,” she wished she had allowed him to write down his name. Casimir what? Casimir who? And she knew now her nice little curtain-line about Stanley Kowalski had been worse than cheap and spiteful – oh, worse; worse. It had been a lie, because she would always and always remember him as Jack Halloran. (p. 181)

Michael, for his part, continues to pursue his literary ambitions, but once again with limited success. His early life post-Lucy is characterised by periods of instability and mental illness, culminating in a spell in Bellevue, a specialist psychiatric hospital in New York. In time, Michael finds some solace in the form of a new, much younger wife, Sarah Garvey, a guidance counsellor at his daughter’s school, but he never seems truly contented.

Meanwhile, the Davenports’ daughter, Laura (aged nine at the time of her parents’ separation) is becoming increasingly disconnected from the world, eventually leaving her home with Lucy to join a hippy commune in California.

The novel closes on a more optimistic note with a meeting between the two Davenports. By now, Lucy is in a good place in life, gaining fulfilment from her new role as an ambassador for Amnesty International. There is a sense that she at least has stopped chasing after the pursuit of artistic fulfilment, possibly in the realisation that it might be hopelessly beyond her talents. For Michael, the situation is more ambiguous; his imminent move to a new teaching job in Boston may lead to the break-up of his second marriage; however, he seems relaxed about the future, still harbouring ambitions of another success to rival ‘Coming Clean’. As for his relationship with Sarah, there is a sense of que será, será – whatever will be, will be.

In writing this novel, Yates gives us an insight into the frustrations and disappointments of a suburban existence, of young hopes eroded by the crushing realities of life. The sections focusing on Lucy’s experiences are particularly good, illustrating once more this author’s undoubted skills in portraying complex, flawed women in ways that feel both perceptive and humane.

While the novel lacks the dramatic tension of Revolutionary Road, it is still very much worth reading for the nuanced characterisation alone. Probably one for Yates completists rather than newbies, who might be better starting with The Easter Parade, or possibly the short story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Irrespective of the changing times, Yates is a writer whose work still stands up today; the emotions he captures in these books are enduring and timeless.

(Revolutionary Road was a pre-blog read for me, hence the lack of review – but you can find Max’s excellent post on the novel here.)

Young Hearts Crying is published by Vintage Books; personal copy.