I think you'll find ordinary people are nicer than you give them credit for being - Richard Yates

there is an automatic pleasure in watching a thing done well.

Where are the windows? he demanded, spreading his hands. That's the question. Where does the light come in?

Thirty years before, in his revision notes for his first novel, Yates pondered what he viewed as the single biggest flaw in his work—sentimentality, the fact that his protagonists Frank and April were "too nice": "See and show both of these people from the outside, in the round, and from the inside too. Be 'simultaneously enchanted and repelled by their inexhaustible variety.' Think about them, and the hell with the reader's sympathies. Make them love and hate each other the way real people do." Yates seized on this approach—showing his characters from the outside and in—as the key to making otherwise unexceptional people interesting