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Disturbing the Peace | 
| Author: Richard Yates
Publisher: Delta
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $8.75
You Save: $6.25 (42%)
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 29905
Media: Paperback
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0385293321
Dewey Decimal Number: 320
EAN: 9780385293327
ASIN: 0385293321
Publication Date: April 1, 1984
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Hailed as “America’s finest realistic novelist” by the Boston Globe, Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, garnered rare critical acclaim for his bracing, unsentimental portraits of middle-class American life. Disturbing the Peace is no exception. Haunting, troubling, and mesmerizing, it shines a brilliant, unwavering light into the darkest recesses of a man’s psyche.
To all appearances, John Wilder has all the trappings of success, circa 1960: a promising career in advertising, a loving family, a beautiful apartment, even a country home. John’s evenings are spent with associates at quiet Manhattan lounges and his weekends with friends at glittering cocktail parties. But something deep within this seemingly perfect life has long since gone wrong. Something has disturbed John’s fragile peace, and he can no longer find solace in fleeting affairs or alcohol. The anger, the drinking, and the recklessness are building to a crescendo—and they’re about to take down John’s career and his family. What happens next will send John on a long, strange journey—at once tragic and inevitable.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
Bare. Honest. November 2, 2008
J. Schell (San Diego, California)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There are books that make you think, and there are books that make you feel. Disturbing the Peace is both. It is the story of a man and his descent into insanity. But it is so much more than that. It is the story of ourselves, told quite plainly, and in such a way that, as a reader, it's very easy to slip in and out of the minds of all the characters, because they are us.
Disturbing the Peace made me think, feel, and believe that I was not simply watching this story unfold as it was told to me, but rather, I was a part of the story as it unfolded around me.
The brilliance of Yates is not in the writing. Rather, it's in the non-writing, that is, what he doesn't put on the page. And opening this book - and any of his books - you are invited to join in and watch or partake as the world crumbles.
Why the genius of Yates has never caught on, we'll never know. Perhaps people were afraid to peer into the stories and see such bold and disturbing representations of themselves and their lives.
Highly Recommended.
Five Stars.
outstanding May 14, 2007
Page Turner (Indiana)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
is it a painfully telling portrait of american domesticity gone awry. it is a book you read from begining to end with as few breaks as possible.
He never disappoints February 2, 2006
R. E. Whitlock
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is the story of John C. Wilder and his descent into insanity. Wilder is a highly strung hard drinking affluent salesman, a husband and father. He tries to hide his low self-esteem which stems from a mild dyslexia and being somewhat short in stature. He seeks to fill the void in his life through drinking and women.
At one point, all of Wilder's ambitions seem within his grasp. He falls in love with a woman who encourages him to pursue his dream of producing films, and it seems he has a real talent for it. However, the seeds of insanity are sown within him. Time after time, he reaches out for help, to his family, to psychiatry, to AA, looking for understanding and support, but every reed breaks at his grasp. It is a disturbing novel. We are left doubting if anything could have averted his fate.
Yates always gets everything right. The dialogue, speech cadences, observations, structure: his writing is a beautiful thing to observe. He is never simplistic. Yates has a reputation for being a devasting chronicler of American suburbia. He is that, but in this novel he shows that he can deliniate urban angst and despair as well.
The Saga of the Downward Spiral August 24, 2005
Douglas Bowman (Bel Air, Maryland United States)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This novel, by one of my favorite late 20th century writers, is a compellingly realistic story of the downward spiral of an alcoholic. It's power comes from the exacting insights into the mundane existence of the characters trying to survive and thrive in modern society; along a view into the mind of a man making a step-by-step descent into a private hell. As Yates draws you into Wilder's mind, you find yourself,like the main character, unable to see the bottom, until you have made the slow descent into insanity.
I found the book incredibly insightful, with accurate representations of the madness of addiction. The book never descends to the level of moralizing or sermonizing, and that makes it all the more powerful. Yates creates an empathy between reader and character, and that makes the outcome all the more gripping.
 Tough in Every Way November 24, 2002
vanishingpoint
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Some have said this is Yates' weakest work, and I suppose it might be, but I think credit has to be given to Yates for even managing to pull this off. This is a tough story to write, a man's journey from sanity to insanity. Yates stays in his usual third person narration all the way, even when the main character goes completely nuts, so his delusions become our delusions.It's not a pleasant experience by any stretch of the imagination - we see get a no-holds-barred view into Bellevue and the complete breakdown of the protagonist. There isn't a likeable character in the entire novel, which isn't that different from Yates' other works, but the problem here is that it's very tough to have any sympathy for the main character, John Wilder. In Yates' more successful books, no matter how nasty the characters, we can't help but to feel for their faults. Not so here. Disturbing the Peace may not have the amazing pace of The Easter Parade or the driving power of Revolutionary Road, but it's still a pretty good read. It's a tough book to find nowadays, so if you can get your hands on it, pick it up.
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