Astute readers will immediately be struck by how many of the stories collected here are about dreamers, and it is perhaps for this reason that it’s hard to read them outside the context of that most famous American Dream story, The Great Gatsby. Yates admired no author more than Fitzgerald, as the writer-dreamer Jack Fields, the protagonist of Yates’s autobiographical story “Saying Goodbye to Sally” suggests. Comparing Yates’s dreamers to Fitzgerald’s is immediately instructive. Gatsby, of course, is not so much the story of a great man as of an ordinary man with a great dream. Jimmy Gatz is determined not just to become rich and win Daisy Buchanan but, more audaciously, to negate the past and reinvent himself, even reshape the world, if need be. Fitzgerald set his novel in a world that is superficially similar to that of Yates’s stories. In both cases, a world war had just concluded and America was victorious. Everything seemed possible except failure. But there were significant differences too. Perhaps because they have vivid memories not just of the war but also the Great Depression that preceded it, Yates’s dreamers are less audacious, more cautious. They want things as badly as Jimmy Gatz, but they have less in the way of expectation. Living all but invisible lives, they’re wary, unsure how much they have a right to hope for. Betty Meyers, a young mother and Navy wife with three kids, “trapped” on the Côte d’Azur, wants desperately to return home to Bayonne, New Jersey, a heartbreakingly modest and totally unironic ambition. In “A Wrestler with Sharks,” Leon Sobel, who’s written (but not published) nine books, wants a column and byline in a tiny trade union newspaper. Indeed, Yates wants us to understand, it may be the very modesty of such desires (for the little house, not the big one) that disguises their potential for life’s most demoralizing failures. Yates understood that while we risk disappointment when we set for ourselves an ambitious goal and fail to achieve it, the challenge, in a sense, insulates us from the worst humiliation. Dream big and we’re expected to fail. About the worst that can happen (Gatsby to the contrary notwithstanding) is that we’ll be applauded for our pluck. Dream small, Yates seems to suggest, and we’re expected to succeed. As a result, failure ensures not just disappointment, but humiliation, anguish, and, most dangerous of all, the impulse to dream smaller next time, thereby risking even greater failure. The characters we meet in Yates’s stories are often already the victims of diminished expectation. Ken Platt, in “A Really Good Jazz Piano,” assumes that when he and his best pal, Carson Wyler, meet two girls on the beach, he’ll get the less attractive one, the “cute, freckled good-sport of a girl whose every cheerful glance and gesture showed she was used to taking second best.”