The Lonely Voice: ‘Fun with a Stranger’ by Richard Yates

Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner discuss “Fun with a Stranger” by Richard Yates.

As with a previous episode, the focus again is a school story — with a teacher and her third grade class.

In the previous episode, William Maxwell’s “Love” helped us see the ways a protagonist learned a lesson about love through his fifth grade teacher, Miss Vera Brown. He learned about love — that it blooms in beautiful and unforgettable ways. Miss Brown was pretty, gentle, and compassionate. The protagonist feels a kind of love from her — and for her.

This time, we see another teacher, Miss Snell, who might seem the polar opposite of Miss Brown. As we discuss here, Miss Snell isn’t all that lovable. She’s an older woman who is described as having a homely smile and mannish features. She’s also tough on her students, even keeping to the regular school day schedule on the last day before the Christmas holiday.

But there are lessons to be learned in this story, too, about love — about compassion. Yates is known for presenting characters in all too real ways that we might interpret as cruel perhaps. Not all teachers are physically attractive. Not all of them are good at throwing little parties or choosing gifts for young children. Miss Snell is set in her ways. She is doing what she knows how to do — and is just who she is — despite what day in December it might be.

And she is as unforgettable as Miss Vera Brown in that other story. Miss Brown was isolated from her students at the end. She died alone. Miss Snell seems to go through her life alone. But her kind of loneliness is something quite else.

And it’s only a writer like Richard Yates who could compose the stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and create the taxonomy of people bereft of love or of friendship — or even of a kind of kinship with the itinerant group of third graders who want to forget about their teacher over Christmas or after the third grade.

Miss Snell will make an indelible imprint and remain almost like a word in their vocabulary — part of the language they will always speak. “And that’s just the way it is with words,” as Miss Snell said.

Richard Yates is the author of “Fun with a Stranger.” It can be found in the collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and in The Collected Stories of Richard Yates.