A dark mirror

"Revolutionary Road" (Vintage: 368 pp., $14.95 paper), Yates' first novel, published in 1961, outlines the decline and fall of Frank and April Wheeler, a suburban couple whose high hopes of being "first rate" are ground into dust by a series of failures and humiliations:

"Nowhere in these plans had he foreseen the weight and shock of reality; nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ('Wouldn't you like to be loved by me?'), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach."

Yates takes us inside Frank's response to April's performance in a local production of Robert Sherwood's "The Petrified Forest." April has artistic and bohemian aspirations. Frank works in a corporate tower in Manhattan while considering himself above all that. He swills four-martini lunches and is having an affair with the ill-named Maureen Grube. The extent of his disillusion is revealed early, and the rest of the book is like watching a car wreck which happens in slow motion but from which it is impossible to avert our gaze.

A similar dread haunts many of the short stories, pretty much from the first sentence. In "Liars in Love" the young wife Carol, soon to leave her husband, reflects on how much she hates London: "It was big and drab and unwelcoming; you could walk or ride a bus for miles without seeing anything nice, and the coming of winter brought an evil-smelling fog that stained everything yellow, that seeped through closed windows and doors to hang in your rooms. . . . " The "evil-smelling fog" afflicts the eyes and soul of a Yates character even when he or she arrives in the brilliance of Los Angeles. "Saying Goodbye to Sally" is one of the best Hollywood stories ever written, at once a hommage to Yates' literary idol F. Scott Fitzgerald, and an unsparing examination of how prickly human aloneness knifes through the equally human need for connection and sex. This piece has the cruel precision of an autopsy and is one of the stories that killed for good one of Yates' own dreams, that he would publish in the New Yorker in his lifetime. "It seems clearer and clearer to me that his kind of fiction is not what we're looking for," wrote New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell.

Ouch. But, then, the New Yorker had John Cheever, whose own mood swings never precluded him from seeing the world's radiance and praising it, and Yates is a little like Cheever with the lights out. In the marvelous Yates story "Builders" (a great place for anyone new to his work to start), a hopeful young writer named Robert Prentice becomes the ghostwriter for Bernie, a New York cabbie. Both men agree that stories should be built as soundly as houses, but Bernie wants wisdom and warm, upbeat endings. He keeps calling for more windows. "I'm not even sure if there are any windows in this particular house," Prentice answers. "Maybe the light is just going to have to come in as best it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder's craftsmanship, and if that's the case you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows, Bernie; God knows, there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us."

Yates died in 1992, alone in a place that was like a cheap motel room, and it seemed like the house of his fiction would collapse and be swept away.

"A good biography could spark a reevaluation of his achievement, though at present there doesn't appear to be one on the horizon," wrote the novelist Stewart O'Nan in an excellent reappraisal of Yates' career that appeared in the Boston Review in 1999, when most of the work had vanished from sight. "Likewise the movie possibilities are nil."

That's changed. Richard Ford provided the introduction for the new edition of "Revolutionary Road," and Picador has many of the other books back in print, including the stories and the novel "The Easter Parade" with its understated yet quietly sumptuous first paragraph, seemingly so simple -- but just try to do it.

Sam Mendes' movie version of "Revolutionary Road" has already been shot, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and is due out later this year. Blake Bailey's masterful and generous 2003 biography "A Tragic Honesty" (Picador: 688 pp., $18 paper) connected the dots between life and work, showing that Yates was at heart an autobiographical writer, drawing always on his relationships with his wives and children and, throughout his career, on his tortured feelings about his mother, also a sadly failed artist.

Even the New Yorker finally joined the Yates party, selecting the previously unpublished "The Canal" when "The Collected Stories" appeared in 2001. In hard times, a wider audience is finally ready for the bleak beauty of a writer whose sad life is turning into posthumous triumph and a testament to endurance. America has fallen into place with the austerity of his vision.

Richard Rayner's Paperback Writers column appears monthly.

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THE SHORT LIST: ALSO NEW IN PAPERBACK

"Mystery Train" by Greil Marcus (Plume)

A new edition, the fifth, of Marcus' indelible first book, an idiosyncratic work that, like David Thomson's "A Biographical Dictionary of Cinema," grows in authority and significance with each authorial overhauling. Marcus takes key rock moments and rock icons -- Robert Johnson, Randy Newman, Sly Stone, the Band and, of course, Elvis -- and riffs out from them into the entire cultural mosaic of America. The result is surprising and endlessly suggestive, effortlessly connecting, for instance, Newman to Raymond Chandler, and Johnson to the dreams and fears of the Puritans.

"The Mistress's Daughter" by A.M. Homes (Penguin)