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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Against all odds -- against, really, his own self-deceptive nature -- Bill does eventually make it to Paris, thanks to the urging of Eileen, who's now his wife (but, of course, won't be for too much longer, he lets us know). The decision to leave New York, to move far away, in particular, from his mother, allows him, finally, to "take up the business of my life." It's a happy ending, for a Yates story, but we're not meant to make a romance out of it. Bill's rueful voice as he relates these events and the self-knowledge that came along with them wouldn't allow for any grandiose or sentimental predictions for his future.
In "Saying Goodbye to Sally," Yates crafts a Hollywood parable out of his own experience. (He spent years there as a screenwriter, though none of his scripts was ever produced.) Patiently chronicling the months Jack Fields, who's published one critically successful but financially unremunerative novel, spends stumbling through L.A., the story scrubs the rosy glow off the scene Jack finds there. The cast of characters is familiar: the arrogant 32-year-old superstar director, the rich divorcee whose Beverly Hills home is full of freeloading hangers-on. Friends and lovers drift together and apart with high passion but no discernible principles. The booze flows freely, of course, providing a fuzzy cover for the aimlessness at the heart of the characters' ambition.
It would be easy to portray Jack as somehow better than these people, and corrupted by them. Instead Yates points out Jack's own insecurities and pretensions -- his "jolly, noisy" going-away party is "closely attuned to the jaunty image of himself that he always hoped to convey to others" -- as well as his naked, naive desire for literary recognition, or at least significance. "What lay ahead of him ... might easily turn out to be a significant adventure: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood."
What happens, of course, is that Jack's illusions are crushed, one by one. The beach house he rents is just as dank, grungy and uninviting as his New York apartment; the secretary girlfriend, Sally, who at first seemed so smart and independent, turns out to be needy and manipulative, in thrall to the scarily superficial rich woman in whose palatial house she lives. The writing ... we don't hear much about the writing. It's crammed in between hours he whiles away with his new L.A. friends, who are all clearly, like Jack -- like Yates -- alcoholics, with all the rationalizations, self-pity, histrionics and wasted hours that comes with.
What's left after Yates has turned himself inside out for us like that -- where's the pleasure in reading it? Richard Russo, in his perceptive, heartfelt introduction to the collection, captures the appeal nicely. The excitement of reading Yates' stories, he says, is in "the exhilaration of encountering, recognizing and embracing the truth. It's not a pretty truth? Too bad. That we recognize ourselves in the blindness, the neediness, the loneliness, even the cruelty of Yates' people, will have to suffice."
I'd venture that there's even more than that going on -- a transaction between Yates and his readers that's almost tender. He's put himself on the line for us in order to deliver the truth as scrupulously, as selflessly, as he knows how, and even in the darkest moments there's a feeling of something like grace hovering around his efforts.
