If you've read Richard Yates since his remarkable first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), or if you've discovered him along the way, through his brilliant collection of stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962), or one of his other novels, especially The Easter Parade (1976) and A Good School (1978), then it probably won't matter to you that his new book of stories is not always up to his best work. With a writer this good, you'll want to see for yourself, as you would with Updike or Cheever, whose turf, the suburbs of the Northeast, Yates often treads.

Were Liars in Love Yates' first book and not his seventh, if it did not have the other books to live up to, then almost any reader would come away from it satisfied. The characters, from a young Scottish prostitute to an aging suburban St. Louis doctor, live; they are believable without being predictable, they...