Richard Yates (novel)
Encyclopedia
Plot
Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning (unrelated to their child starChild star
Child star can refer to:* a child actor* a child singer*"Child Star," a song by The Unicorns from their 2003 album Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?...
namesakes) are friends who initially met over the internet and converse with each other regularly through Gmail
Gmail
Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well via POP3 or IMAP protocols. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though...
chat
Google Talk
Google Talk is a freeware voice over Internet protocol client application offered by Google Inc. The first beta version of the program was released on August 24, 2005...
. Haley is a 22 year old author in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, and Dakota is a high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
student in a nearby suburb in New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
.
Background
Prior to writing Richard Yates, Lin sold 10 percent shares of its royalties at US$2000 each. Expressing a desire to focus solely on the book in lieu of maintaining an income for living expenses, Lin said, “I actually will work better on my second novel, the way the novel is right now, if I have no obligations or responsibilities at all.” According to Lin, a conventional book deal with a publisher would have only provided him with a month's worth for living costs, whereas through private investments he had thought he could make enough money through to live off of for three or four months. Six days after announcing his plan, Lin had sold 60 percent of the royalties in shares, earning a total of $12000.Reception
Richard Yates, like Lin's previous work, was met with a polarized critical reception. Many reviewers criticized Lin's idiosnycratic writing style, which is plain and minimally descriptive. One critic wrote that his prose "may appeal to a bored and banalized readership, but the writing is anything but appealing." Other reviews were more forgiving; in Charles BockCharles Bock
Charles Bock is an American writer whose debut 2008 novel Beautiful Children was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2008, and won the 2009 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters...
's mostly negative review for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Bock admitted that Lin could be "genuinely funny", and that "[w]hen Haley Joel and Dakota find solace in each other through small, intimate gestures, or in descriptions of Dakota’s defeated parents, Lin’s flat style resonates." The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
's review described Lin's writing as having "the effect of putting a red butterfly behind glass: detached but brighter."
Foreign editions
A Spanish edition was published by Alpha Decay in Spring 2011.A French edition is forthcoming from Au Diable Vauvert and an Italian edition is forthcoming from Saggiatore.