These stringent, ruthlessly straightforward (yet never, thank God, "minimalist") stories are set mostly in the late '40s and '50s, yet they're perfect reading for right now, when we're just starting to reacquaint ourselves with economic downturn and widespread economic anxiety, when our political discourse is insipid and our mass culture seems more vacuous than ever. In their measured, crystalline prose, Yates' stories make us ask how we ever expected so much in the first place. They demolish all pretense, puncture all forms of bloat. Yates lays into his characters' human flaws with a merciless precision. Yet he's never simply cruel or bilious; he's got his eye on something higher and finer. Somehow, once you've let him blow away your last vestige of hope in the redeeming value of humankind, you feel oddly cleansed, as if finally, now, you can start to think a few things that are true.

There's not much left once Yates is done with postwar America. Self-interest, faithlessness and delusions of grandeur appear to have infiltrated every last corner of his characters' lives. The family? Smothering, or chilly, or both in exactly the wrong ways. Marriage? A sadly deluded act, entered into for ridiculously flimsy reasons, proving in practice to be just a setup for the long indignity of divorce and alimony payments. Friendship? A pathetic, temporary attempt at a substitute for marriage and family, minus the alimony when things drift or break apart, as they inevitably will. The corporate world? A slow death of gray, soul-sucking, windowless busy work. Bohemia? A shabby, laughable stab at glory by those too untalented to create real art, too conceited to get a real job. Patriotism? A lazy longing for the dull, familiar pain of home. Love? Ha.

Dark as it is, Yates' message is not nihilistic. He's not saying that life is merely meaningless or unfair. In fact he metes out disappointment and failure and mortification to his characters with a marked sense of justice, even of decency. He's an equal-opportunity humiliator -- in his fictional universe a wealthy and powerful film director is no less self-deceiving than the lowliest clerk who dreams of the corner office; the beautiful fall on their faces as often as the ugly. As for writers, they may be the saddest of all Yates' characters, with their refusal ever to admit to failure, their embarrassing secret fantasies of fame and honor, their vain, impotent hopes of being the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald, their bluster about "moving to Paris to write."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"