Originally appeared in The Boston Review

How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print.

SINCE HIS DEATH in 1992, all nine of Richard Yates’s titles have quietly dropped off the shelves. Once the most vaunted of authors–praised by Styron and Vonnegut and Robert Stone as the voice of a generation–he seems now to belong to that august yet sad category, the writer’s writer. Andre Dubus, who was his student at Iowa, revered him, as does Tobias Wolff, and the jackets of Yates’s books are adorned with quotes by the likes of Tennessee Williams and Dorothy Parker, Ann Beattie and Gina Berriault. When authors talk his name pops up as the American writer we wish more people would read, just as Cormac McCarthy’s used to. In the acknowledgments section of his novellas, Women With Men, Richard Ford makes it plain: “I wish to record my debt of gratitude to the stories and novels of Richard Yates, a writer too little appreciated.”

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TOMORROW THE LAST Chevrolet Camaro will roll off the assembly line in Quebec, news that has saddened and shocked old muscle car aficionados here.

The fans don’t understand. There’s nothing wrong with the Camaro, they say. It’s better looking than its lifelong competition, the Ford Mustang, and the Z-28–the performance model–packs a tire-smoking 325 horsepower engine.

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AS USUAL, we know who we’re bombing, but we’re not sure just what the effect will be. That sentiment rules not only Washington, where, after a week of high-pitched rhetoric questioning his decision, the Republicans scrambled to back up President Clinton’s policy, but also the streets and grocery stores across the rest of the country. Clerks and busdrivers ask with proper seriousness: What exactly will this action accomplish?

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WITH THE ARREST of Gulf War veteran John Muhammad and his young accomplice John Malvo, the D.C. sniper case that filled the airwaves for three weeks has dwindled to a few roundtable wrap-ups, ending the biggest wave of serial killer hysteria since The Son of Sam. And while the news reporters seem grateful that the panic they helped foster is gone, there’s an odd nostalgia to their recaps, the skillful video montages bringing back the past three weeks with maybe too much loving attention to the shattered plate glass windows and yellow crime scene tape around the gas pumps. It’s as if they already miss those crazy days.

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AL CAPONE would have turned 100 this week, a milestone few people outside of his adopted home of Chicago have noted.

In a country that feeds with such frenzy on its popular past, this is strange. Over the past fifteen years, mainstream American culture has been greedily recreating the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and now even the ’80s. There are signs that our popular historical vision has begun to re-include World War II, if only for the breadth of its spectacle and the opportunity to make easy moral pronouncements. But the Jazz Age, prohibition and the Great Depression have disappeared, it seems, from our screens, large and small.

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