A Glutton For Punishment by Richard Yates, 1962
The magic trick:
A brilliantly written scene about the firing of a man from his job
Using this week to clear up a blind spot in my SSMT archives. I haven’t read much Richard Yates Honestly, the thing I know best about him is that Larry David dated his daughter, based the Elaine character in Seinfeld on her, and wrote an episode featuring a father character – cartoonishly dour – based on Yates himself.
Turns out, Yates also wrote some really good short stories. Who knew?
So we start with “A Glutton For Punishment,” a story about a young family man who is fired from his office job one day. The event falls in line, we’re told, with a lifelong relishing of playing the hero’s death for our protagonist. It may be the only thing he’s really good at – going all the way back to his childhood love of taking a bullet in the Army games he and his friends would play as kids.
The story takes a semi-comic tone, but reading it 60 years later, it strikes me that Yates has struck at a characteristic of the American male that is fairly essential. Certainly, it’s a central tenet of the Trump base. Why try to succeed when you can play the victim instead?
I’d like to highlight a single scene too. When you have an idea for a story about what a guy does when he loses his job, you probably will have to write the scene where the guy loses his job. So it is here, and Yates doesn’t do anything flashy with the scene. It’s not like he’s shifting perspectives in a surprising way or retelling the event out of order or something. It’s simply a scene in an office where one man tells another that he no longer has a job. And it’s just so well-executed. You can picture the scene completely; picture the tension in the air. But it’s not bogged down in the description. It moves quickly, each sentence communicating multiple things at once about the action, characterization, and setting. It’s just one scene in the story, but I really think it’s a great page or so to study if you want to micro-analyze how someone constructs a scene.
And that’s quite a trick on Yates’s part.
The selection:
Crowell leaned back, and when he raised his hands their moisture left two gray, perfect prints on the glass, like the hands of a skeleton. Walter stared at them, fascinated, while they shriveled and disappeared.
“Well,” he said, and looked up. “You put that very nicely, George. Thanks.”
Crowell’s lips worked into an apologetic, regular guy’s smile.
“Awfully sorry,” he said. “These things just happen.” And he began to fumble with the knobs of his desk drawers, visibly relieved that the worst was over.
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