Some things Richard Yates said (according to Blake Bailey).

 

-Read Jane Austen, “who had balls.”

-Avoid Katherine Mansfield, “who didn’t” (have balls).

-Gina Berriault had “balls to spare”.

-Cheever was a “dirty old man” who wrote about farts and so forth, and his slick prose didn’t compensate for the sprawl of his work.

-“Don’t be seduced by prose, the point is structure”

-John O’Hara is the same as Cheever.

-Ulysses was far better than Finnegan’s Wake.

-Billy Bud was better than Moby Dick because the latter sprawled.

-A High Wind in Jamaica and Invisible Man were wonderful, classically structured novels.

-Characters shouldn’t be too ‘knowy’ about themselves; rather they should reveal themselves obliquely, like the narrator’s in Ford’s A Good Soldier or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

-Avoid ‘privacy’ and ‘preciousness’ –neither fiction nor poetry is ‘a letter home’.

-Honesty is not, per se, a virtue (remember what Anatole France…

The Voyage Out Book Group’s Reader’s Guide to Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

Vintage

317 pages

9582701048

 Region:

The “Great American Novel”

Other Books From Region:

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born sometime around April 23, 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The oldest of five, he grew up wealthy, moving between St. Petersburg, and an estate fifty miles to the south in the countryside. He enjoyed tennis and soccer, and chasing and collecting butterflies.

Nabokov’s Russian adolescence was under the rule of Nicholas II. The Nabokovs were at piece with the czar’s regime, though Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a famous and controversial liberal politician. He was imprisoned in 1908 for ninety days for his involvement in a political manifesto.

Meanwhile, Nabokov’s mother, Elena Ivanova, raised the three boys and two girls in aristocratic fashion, using…