Books: More Loneliness

A GOOD SCHOOL

by Richard Yates

Delacorte; 192 pages; $8.95

Richard Yates is a good but doleful writer who once, titled a short-story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. The stories were first-rate, but the title showed a kind of perverse bravado: You think you're miserable? Listen, I know more kinds of loneliness ... Well, he did and he does, and he adds a couple to the list in this impeccably written but rather dispirited novel of life at a mediocre Connecticut boys' school.

The time is 1943, and the knowledge that each senior class at...