i was not prepared for this book.

when i read books i always have a pen or highlighter to mark passages that really jump off the page. this book has wild, dancing scrawls all over the margins. and now, with all this beautiful language and vivid passages the thing i'm most left wondering about is how this guy, this one guy, richard yates, was so able to get into the heads, the souls of so many people, male and female alike. it's obviously rare to find a person who can write the opposite gender so believably (granted he dove deeper with the men, but still).

this book was written in 1961. i'm young and naive enough to feel surprised that this sort of disfunction went on back then. if it didn't intentionally date itself at times, you'd be dead sure it was a story about contemporary times which says such problems aren't new, just possibly more rampant.

oh, and by the way, whoever wrote the script for the film american beauty as some point in their life read this book, and probably read it more than once. obviously, i have no way of knowing this, but i do.