At the end of the last [story in "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness,"] the narrator says: "I'm not even sure if there are any windows in this particular house…." The house is a metaphor for the story itself, which marks, I believe, a significant step forward in Richard Yates' art. It leads one to expect the same sort of excellence in his future short stories as he achieved in his first novel, "Revolutionary Road."

"The house of fiction has ∗∗∗ not one window, but a million," Henry James wrote, "every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable ∗∗∗ by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will." The windows that Mr. Yates opens on experience move on well-oiled hinges. The individual vision is, however, lacking in some of them: we have seen the view and the characters before. In these stories Mr...