Coming Clean

By JAY COCKS

YOUNG HEARTS CRYING by Richard Yates Delacorte; 347 pages; $16.95

Michael Davenport is not often on to himself. His life, a spiraling series of small revelations, major evasions and consequent breakdowns, bears down on him untidily and at unexpected moments. He manages, struggling, to still his madness. He succeeds, periodically, in publishing some poetry. Out of all three volumes, there are some indications that one poem will endure. It is called, with a combination of confessional irony and innuendo, Coming Clean.

There seems to be no way for Davenport to establish any kind of permanent, personal order, no means of giving up the grand ambitions that keep intruding on his domestic life. Sometimes, sensing this, he is seized by fury. He drinks, rages and periodically plays a game of trading punches with an unwary, usually unworthy opponent: "Hit me as hard as you can. Right here." There are moments, though, when the impossibility of his ambitions comes burning through in a way his talent never does, and then he becomes not only humble but abject. "Know what we did, Lucy?" he asks his wife, after their marriage has shredded. "We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?"

Young Hearts Crying is the work of a writer who knows the territory, from temporary exhilaration to piercing despair, and who is fully aware that yearning is not only a good way to go crazy but also a pretty good place to hide out from hard truth. Richard Yates is usually considered a master of the realistic voice: spare and shrewd, cutting and chilling. But for all the leanness of his writing, his language can carry considerable weight. Without apparent effort it eases past the conventions of simple realism toward deadpan comedy and social panorama. Young Hearts Crying could stand as a definitive portrait of a man and woman, maturing in the 1940s, who spend the next three decades trying to get a grip on dwindling dreams that will not die and who have to settle down and, finally, just settle.

At first, Lucy lives through Michael and his sporadic poetry, but, as she starts to sense the limits of his creative gifts, she also reaches the limits of the marriage.

After they divorce, Lucy is left with the daily responsibility of their young daughter. She looks for additional solace in psychotherapy, satisfaction in a series of perhaps deliberately ill-chosen affairs, fulfillment in anything creative that is handy. She acts in a local theater, doing brave combat with the role of Blanche DuBois and going to bed with the director. Leaving her, he carries the expensive leather suitcases -- "the two prettiest things I ever saw" -- Lucy gave him. "One of the small misfortunes of being a rich girl, and she'd known it all her life, was that people would often exaggerate their pleasure when you gave expensive gifts ... It nearly always made her feel foolish, but it hadn't ever stopped her from making the same mistake the next time."

There are other next times. Lucy enrolls in a writing class at the New School, and becomes enthralled with the young novelist who teaches the course. The pattern repeats: she romanticizes his gifts, is disappointed, buys her way out of the affair. She enrolls at the Art Students League and, after years, when she finally musters the courage to show her best work to two friends who are professionals, is told the paintings are "nice." She asks for a drink, and gives up.

Michael Davenport keeps at it, perhaps unwisely. After more than one episode of psychosis and years of trying to wring poems from a life that eludes him, he marries Sarah Garvey, his daughter's high school guidance counselor, and accepts a teaching post at Billings State University in Kansas. There is no sanctuary on the open plains. The professor tries to write his way out, but finds himself describing the results to his wife and his publisher as "kind of a transitional book -- kind of a plateau performance, if you see what I mean." It is a plateau that, more and more, starts to look like home.

Amid the rubble of these wrecked dreams, Yates has found a fine book, glancing and tough and always forgiving.

Young Hearts Crying slips seamlessly into the group of Yates novels that includes Revolutionary Road, Disturbing the Peace and The Easter Parade. All chart the kind of loss, loneliness and irony that are lastingly contemporary. He is just the writer that Michael Davenport always wanted to be .