Richard Yates (1926–92), who would have turned a hundred in February, shared with one of his characters an ambition to “publish fifteen books before he died, and to have no more than three of them—‘or four, tops’—be the kind of books that would have to be apologized for.” Though the book in which these words appeared, Young Hearts Crying (1984), was almost immediately apologized for (“a failed ’84 novel I’ll always regret having written”), Yates held to the ambition. In the late 1980s he made a list of his total prospective output that included the nine books he had already written, the one he was working on, and the titles of books eleven, fourteen, and fifteen.

But it was not to be. A chain-smoking alcoholic with a history of mental illness, emphysema, tuberculosis, and epilepsy, he was a dying man with neither time nor energy even to complete book ten. (For a closer look at Yates’s troubled life, see “The disaster parade,” by Eric Ormsby, in the January 2004 issue of The New Criterion.) In his final month he laid his manuscript aside, “got smashed,” and reread with “tears running down my cheeks” his first book, Revolutionary Road (1961), one he believed he had never bettered. “Two inches in the [New York] Times,” he would say on the subject of his obituary—“at best, and the only book they’ll mention is Revolutionary Road.”

If his prediction was not quite accurate—the Times’s ten-inch obit did briefly reference his other books—he was right about the one he would be remembered for. Then only a cult novel, Revolutionary Road has with the help of some vocal admirers and a high-profile 2008 film adaptation gone on to be acknowledged widely as one of the jewels of post-war American fiction. And not before time. The story of a desperately unhappy couple with inflated ideas of their specialness, the novel is a devastating portrait of marriage, a blistering satire of 1950s suburbia, a hilarious office comedy, and a treasure trove of exquisite prose.

His other books await their happy ending. Following Revolutionary Road ’s rediscovery, all eight have limped back into print, with his 1976 novel The Easter Parade even achieving something of its own cult following. But none is read widely. This is the curse of the extraordinary first book, one that Yates’s cofinalist for the 1962 National Book Award, Joseph Heller for Catch-22, learned all too well: the author’s next books, however different, are held to the impossible standards of the first and dismissed accordingly.

And what Yates did next was very different. Where Revolutionary Road was a grand American tragedy in the style of his beloved Great Gatsby, much of his later writing would not look out of place between the covers of an Anne Tyler novel. As the fifteen-book hopeful of Young Hearts Crying, Carl Traynor, says of his own work in progress:

Every Brilliant Thing, a one-person show (starring Daniel Radcliffe at the Hudson Theatre through May 24, then continuing with Mariska Hargitay), is a manic play about depression. It would have been more aptly titled “I need a lithium prescription.” It’s a first-person piece, but not a monologue, structured around the speaker’s life story as he considers his mother’s three suicide attempts starting when he was seven years old. Baffled and scared, the young boy (who goes unnamed in the work by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, the comic who first performed it) tries to cheer her up with a list of things that make life worth living. The play has been touring regularly since it debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014, with various performers including Minnie Driver and Phoebe Waller-Bridge taking the role.

Plumping up this very slight seventy-minute play to give it Broadway dimensions required hiring a big star, albeit in this case also a tiny one: Radcliffe, the erstwhile Harry Potter who is wee of stature but expansive in energy. He roams around the house while the audience members are finding their seats, engages several of them in brief and conspiratorial chat, and, it turns out, puts some of them in the show. Dozens of ticket holders are seated in rows on the stage, and three of them get chosen to take fairly prominent, if brief, speaking roles interacting with the star.

Radcliffe, bearded and earnest in sneakers and a sweatshirt, charm-bombs his way through the performance. He has to, given how weak the material is: it’s an undercooked, immature effort that relies heavily on an interactive gimmick. Upon being prompted by Radcliffe, many audience members get an opportunity to shout out to the entire theater entries from the aforementioned list of brilliant things, which he has handed out before the show. Number one: “ice cream!” Other line items include “beds,” “a much-needed sneeze,” “the color yellow,” “the word pumpernickel,” and “knowing someone well enough to get them to check your teeth for broccoli.”

It’s like basing a show on the wisdom of kitchen magnets. Even at just over an hour, the wheeze gets wheezy long before the end. At one point of extreme jolliness, Radcliffe even enjoins the entire audience to get on its feet and boogie around as a disco ball twirls. At another, everyone present is cued to read out “Number 1,000” (an insert in the Playbill): “Waking up late with someone you love!” Some of the brilliant things about life are greeting-card banalities—old people holding hands—while others are the sorts of observations that inspire stand-up comedy bits: “The prospect of dressing up as a Mexican wrestler.” The character aims to reach one million brilliant things, though he barely seems to think about what’s actually ailing his mother and how her depression might be treated. (Despite the memoirish stylings and the first-person narration, the work is a piece of fiction.)