“Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn’t much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.” 

Cold Spring Harbor is a disappointing Yates novel. His final one, -- and by no coincidence I think -- Cold Spring Harbor is Yatesian in the sense that it covers loneliness, troubling family and relationship dynamics, and an inability for a young man to fit into the traditionally accepted social image projected from living a quintessentially American life. Its themes are familiar for Yates, but the story, clocking in at a lean 180 pages, is so basic that it's boring. It's interesting that Yates and so many writers of his ilk (e.g., Ford, Cheever, Updike, etc.) have made stories about "relatable dysfunctional American families and relationship dynamics" for decades and many of them are excellent. Revolutionary Road, for example, is one of my favorite novels. But the sense I get is that Yates, who wrote this novel in the mid-1980s, had exhausted himself of this sort of content and couldn't reinvent himself any other way. It's a shame on the one hand, but on the other the prose is also unexpectedly poor, and that is somehow even more unforgivable considering Yates' reputation as a brilliant writer. Characters are cliche-ridden and act in predictable and arbitrary ways. The reader often feels like they're reading a scene from a movie, not a scene from real life. To put it simply, there's no impetus for this story to exist. Certainly, there's no push or passion from Yates to compel. It's thematically vacuous and unsatisfying.