I mean talk about decadence, he declared, how decadent can a society get? Look at it this way. This country's probably the psychiatric, psychoanalyti… - Richard Yates

Another thing I have always liked about both Gatsby and Bovary, [Yates] wrote, is that there are no villains in either one. The force of evil is felt in these novels but is never personified—neither novel is willing to let us off that easily.

She too was a divorced mother, though her former husband had vanished long ago and was referred to only as "that bastard" or "that cowardly son of a bitch".

But this isn't a lecture course. The only way any of us can learn this craft is by saturating ourselves in examples of it, in and out of print, and then trying to put the best of what we've found into our own work.