Y ... Why

After getting 2013 off to a slow and unsatisfying start, book-wise, I decided to venture back to last year's bucket list and nibble away at the unreviewed letters.  Where I picked up many of these titles, I don't know, though probably Amazon, as now I discover our library system does not have many of them on the shelves.  I hit on Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates.

Perhaps I should have stopped as soon as I saw that Yates also wrote Revolutionary Road.  Maybe I should have checked out Wiki to discover DTP is considered Yates' worst novel.  It is.  It reminds me a lot of Kingsley Amis and his drunken protagonists in a male dominated culture of omphaloskeptics.   Or of an especially badly scripted season of Mad Men.

It's taken me a couple of years to identify a genre that I do not like at all:  Amis, now Yates, Philip Roth, John Irving.  The exact opposite of "chick lit" these guys, no matter what decade they wrote in, have used the novel to camouflage their own confused, near neurotic lives, endlessly questioning and propounding the following mantras:

I have not earned the fame granted to me, but give me more.
I am in an intellectually barren marriage and horny as hell and seducing any young thing at the drop of a hat (or trousers).
I drink, a lot.
I continue drinking until I am practically psychotic.
I have a nervous breakdown and since I hate shrinks, I drink.
My parents hate me.
I am a fake at work.

So these were the fathers of the middle aged men in England and America now.  If they spawned writers, the themes are often just as self-indulgent.  If their heirs have found other kinds of lives, they have hardly grown up to be the pride of their generation or their nation.

Give me less self-involved novels, please.