That war [WW2] seems to have functioned like an impossibly stern father: no performance would ever suffice.

Yates's stories and novels return repeatedly to the weakness and hysterical anxiety of mid-twentieth-century American masculinity. His fiction, begun in the early 1950s, and written throughout the next four decades, was closely shadowed by the Second Word War. For Yates. that war seems to have functioned like an impossibly stern father: no performance would ever suffice. If you fought in it, you never fought bravely enough (Yates was anxious about the bravery of his own conduct in the Seventy-Fifth Division, in Europe); if you missed it, the rest of your life would be perforated with inadequacies.

J. Wood, The fun stuff  (2013), 201