Product Description

John Wilder is in his mid-thirties, a successful salesman with a place in the country, an adoring wife and a ten-year-old son. But something is wrong. His family no longer interests him, his infidelities are leading him nowhere and he has begun to drink too much. Then one night, something inside John snaps and he calls his wife to tell her that he isn't coming home.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20174 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade, and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992.

Customer Reviews

Disturbing (but Pleasing)
It was with a strange and sad feeling that I realised, while reading Disturbing the Peace (first published in 1975), that this was the last time I would read a work of fiction by Richard Yates anew. Methuen have now reissued all his novels in the UK, and the cupboard is bare. And this novel, his third, has a weak reputation, and was the runt of Methuen's litter. Was it worth it?

The answer is yes. Some of it contains Yates's most vivid and immersive writing, not least the 40-page second chapter where the protagonist, John Wilder, spends a long (long) weekend in a psychiatric unit, the Bellevue, after being signed in by his best friend. "With friends like that..." you might think, but where we join the book it is clear that Wilder has for a long time been skirting the lip of a full nervous breakdown, largely fuelled by alcohol dependency. We can only presume that the Bellevue scene, like the utterly destructive alcoholism Wilder suffers, comes from Yates's own experience, in which case it's all the more remarkable that he even left us with this many complete works.

Disturbing the Peace also has a pithiness in much of the dialogue and narrative that some of his later work seems to lack, and lovely careful use of specific words, like the "probably" in the scene where Wilder renounces his lover and returns to his wife, and a paragraph of renewed marital love and happiness ends with the thought:

"This was probably where he really belonged."

However. Just as the book is racing along at a tremendous lick - miserable alco-ad-man, desperate housewife, inscrutably sad kid, all the fun of the fair - there is a switch halfway through which seems to fall somewhere between hazardous and disastrous. It's a reflexive and self-referential bit of narrative sleight of hand which seems quite out of keeping with Yates's usual pinpoint realism, almost postmodern by his standards, and threatens to derail the whole thing. And the sudden changes which follow this (I kept skipping back going, How did we get here again?) suggest reams of unproductive prose hacked out by an editor - or Yates the morning after.

Gradually, though, this bizarre bit of fancy is assimilated into the story and begins to make more sense as the story goes on. In Yates's biography, Blake Bailey suggests that the book is intended in part as a satire on modern values of sanity and insanity, but it's hard to detect this among the usual - and brilliant - Yates miserablism. The ending is more satisfying than (and as bleak as) many of this others, giving a circular sense of completeness to the story.

It seems to me that much of Yates's best work came toward the end of his life - Cold Spring Harbor, Young Hearts Crying - which makes his early (ish: 66) death a greater loss yet. He had also begun producing books more swiftly as the years went on - fifteen years for his first three, ten years for the next four. His loss to literature is immeasurable, but seven kinds of loneliness are better than none.

19th Nervous Breakdown.
American writer Richard Yates has undergone something of a renaissance of late, largely thanks to the recent film adaptation of his best novel 'Revolutionary Road'. These days, he's mentioned in the same breath as Updike and Cheever as a chronicler of suburban misadventures and the faded side of the American Dream. 'Disturbing the Peace', his third novel, has long been considered his weakest book -it's not, but its negative reception undoubtedly stems from the tough and gritty subject matter; an ad salesman with a drink problem has a breakdown and is checked into a psychiatric ward. Upon his release, he tries to carry on as normal with his wife, their young child and his job, but his alcoholism along with what he perceives as his failings and disappointments in life, conspire to bring on greater problems.

Yates' writing style is concise and unfussy, and he's easy to read, with a special talent for those uncomfortable human moments that occur between people, and some jet black humour, but it's still a dark and gruelling account of one man's descent into personal despair. For those who have read about Yates' life, there are also some uncomfortably raw autobiographical elements, which perhaps explain why he felt compelled to write it.

If you're reading Yates for the first time, I'd recommend 'Revolutionary Road' or the story collections ('Eleven Kinds of Loneliness', 'Liars in Love') as a primer before tackling his more 'difficult' work.

Grim, dark, gritty
This novel is about the downward spiral of an alcoholic. I found the book incredibly insightful, with accurate representations of the madness of addiction. The book never descends to the level of moralizing or sermonizing, and that makes it all the more powerful. Yates creates an empathy between reader and character, and that makes the outcome all the more gripping.