DISCOVERIES

THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS JOB FOR A LIFE A Chronic Overachiever Finds the Way Home By Jonathan Lazear Crown: 160 pp., $17

For Jonathan Lazear, it began as a child with a workaholic invisible father. He was asked again and again, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”--a question which never inspires the answers, a good mommy or daddy.

As an adult with three children and his own literary agency, Lazear resented the chaos of home and his inability to do anything right or to bond with his children because he was so preoccupied with work. He thought it was enough to show up. “The fiction is at work,” he writes. “The fact is at home. I preferred the fiction.” Workaholism, Lazear explains, has a lot in common with narcissism and alcoholism. It can be cured, for example, by remembering that you have choices, by being aware of the phony buzz, by not trying to please your managers as if they were your absent father, but it’s not easy. The book includes several surveys that can help the reader measure just how much trouble he is in, and even 12 steps for workaholics. “You too,” Lazear writes, “can find the way home.”

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF RICHARD YATES By Richard Yates Henry Holt: 474 pp., $28

In his introduction to this collection, Richard Russo calls Richard Yates’ stories “the springboard” for “Raymond Carver and just about every other writer of realistic fiction in America today.” Many of Yates’ characters are in their mid-to late-20s, living in the late 1940s, when the stories are set. World War II is fresh in their minds; their lives have been interrupted and glued back together. Postwar family structure, the first widespread deviations from the nuclear family and single motherhood, all make for a shiny brave-new-world stage, which becomes a slightly frightening backdrop to the stories, peopled with whores and orphans and nurses and trust-fund boys wandering around Europe or facing their first jobs as writers in Manhattan.

The first stories are from “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness” (1962), followed by stories from “Liars in Love” (1981), followed by nine uncollected stories, only two of them previously published in Ploughshares. The earliest stories are by far Yates’ most electric: bumpy and unpredictable. The characters are truly misguided; they want so little from the world and are simply unable to make the world work for them: The young teacher who wants life to be easier for the new boy, who’s an orphan; the young man, searching for a true artist in Paris, wants to believe in the possibility of art without money. The stories from “Liars in Love” are slicker, less risky. Yates uses more adjectives in the 1980s than he did in the 1960s; he seems more self-conscious.

By the time a reader gets to the uncollected stories there is a kind of yearning for the old uneven-ness, and we get it. In these stories, it is the repeating details that leap out from past decades as well: raincoats, the word “nice,” the romance of falling down dead like a boy playing soldier. These uncollected stories contain clues and explanations to questions raised in previously published books, as exemplified in the story, “A Private Possession,” about a little girl who is sent to live with an aunt and finds a 50-cent piece in the schoolyard. Convinced that she is lying about finding the money, the only thing the girl actually owns, her aunt marches her back to school to confess to a nun that she has stolen it. But she hasn’t.

It is a seminal story for Yates, who thinks a great deal in his stories about lying, about the lack of control over outcomes, about the root of all lying being the need to own something. “In a sudden panic, Eileen wants to scream, ‘I didn’t steal it! I found it! I found it!’ Instead, she stands there waiting for it to be over. On the street car, silent, she watches the lavender blur of passing weeds. (I hate her, I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.)” It’s an uneven collection, yes, but evenness is not a sufficient or even necessary quality in a collection that spans a writer’s entire life.

A FEW CORRECTIONS By Brad Leithauser Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $24

It’s a clever ruse for a novel, an obituary, annotated fact-by-fact by an assiduous reporter who turns out to be none other than the son of the deceased. Who was this man, his father, with not one but three wives (two of them simultaneously), not one but several children?

Luke, son of that prince among con men, Wesley Sultan, learns more about his own identity than he perhaps cares to in the course of his exploration of his father’s life. The clever rubric overshadows Brad Leithauser’s fine and sensitive writing. It also draws out the novel, which may have been a better short story.