crooked road

"What sets Yates apart, the true marvel of his legacy, is the very writing itself. His deft and miraculously weightless prose was Shaker-simple, a levitation act of declarative sentences, near-neutral observations and unremarkable utterances, as if the author were as powerless as the reader in controlling the destinies of his characters - the slow-motion train wreck of the lives to come, the soul-killing self-realisations that will invariably be their lot."

Richard Price on Richard Yates