Two Richard Yates novels, Disturbing the Peace (1975) and Cold Spring Harbor (1986), have been reissued in paperback.
From Disturbing the Peace:
Everything began to go wrong for Janice Wilder in the summer of 1960. And the worst part, she said afterwards, the awful part, was that it seemed to happen without warning.
She was thirty-four and the mother of a ten-year-old son. The fading of her youth didn’t bother her — it hadn’t been a very carefree or adventurous youth anyway — and if her marriage was more of an arrangement than a romance, that was all right too. Nobody’s life was perfect. She enjoyed the orderly rotation of her days; she enjoyed books, of which she owned a great many; and she enjoyed her high, bright apartment with its view of midtown Manhattan towers. It was neither a rich nor an elegant apartment, but it was comfortable — and “comfortable” was one of Janice Wilder’s favorite words. She was fond of the word “civilized,” too, and of “reasonable” and “adustment” and “relationship.” Hardly anything upset or frightened her: the only things that did — sometimes to the point of making her blood run cold — were things she didn’t understand.
“I don’t understand,” she said to her husband on the telephone. “What do you mean you ‘can’t’ come home?” And she glanced uneasily at their boy, who sat on the carpet eating an apple and absorbed in the CBS Evening News.
Disturbing the Peace (Delta; $15) IN STOCK.
