Cheap The Easter Parade: A Novel (Book) (Richard Yates) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Easter Parade: A Novel

A seamless, engrossing, and dark novel of missed opportunities
In reading THE EASTER PARADE, focus on the seamless craft of Richard Yates, not on his bleak story. This story features Sarah and Emily Grimes, who, in youth, seem positioned to enjoy promising, albeit not spectacular, futures. But too little money, too many children, and too much booze erode Sarah's marriage while Emily's good start--a scholarship at Barnard--leads only to bad-luck relationships with troubled men, mediocre jobs, and alcoholism. <
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>What Yates accomplishes with this gloomy material is amazing. Somehow, he manages to make the inexorable and parallel glides downward of these sisters into a riveting tale, where childish competitiveness, pride, or selfishness keep the sisters from reconciling or helping each other. Throughout, Yates never points fingers or explains their isolation. Instead, he simply shows the slow collapse of two lives. Only at the very end does he offer an observation that sums up THE EASTER PARADE. "When terrible things happen," says Emily's nephew, "there usually isn't anyone to blame." <
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>A good book. (And tonight, I'll skip that nightcap.) <
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Tragedy and Resurrection
I agree with Orrin Judd's excellent review found elsewhere on this page, but there are a few more things I would like to say about Richard Yates' "The Easter Parade." In his fine biography, [[ASIN:0312423756 A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates]], Blake Bailey writes that if you believe in family, or people can learn from their mistakes then this novel isn't for you. That's an exaggeration, but Yates' book is a dark dissection of the disintegration many American families went through in the mid-20th century. The Grimes sisters have nothing to cling to because no one, especially not their family, has given them a way to figure out their lives. As Yates writes in his other classic, [[ASIN:0375708448 Revolutionary Road]], the people who knew how to live apparently weren't sharing that information. The concision and power of this novel remind me of Saul Bellow's [[ASIN:0140189378 Seize the Day (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)]], another book about how one can utterly fail at one's life. Throughout the novel Emily Grimes' mantra is "I see" but of course she sees nothing, and drifts in and out of relationships with hideously inappropriate men. Although one of them, Jack Flanders (who is a washed-up poet) is a scathing self-portrait by Yates. Emily Grimes is, in one sense "one of the first women's libbers" as her nephew Peter puts it (because of her stubbornly defended single life) but she pays a terrible price for her solitude. <
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>You can marvel at just how much Yates packs into a short 229 pages of elegantly written prose. "The Easter Parade" is a kind of social history of America from the 1940's to the 1970's as reflected in the unhappy lives of two sisters. It's also homage to Yates' beloved F. Scott Fitzgerald. In a way it resembles [[ASIN:0811212475 The Crack-Up]] in that it's an attempt by a writer to come to terms with his own hard experience. (For clues of just how chillingly autobiographical this novel is, read Bailey's book on Yates.) It is different from much of Yates other work because it leaves open the possibility of redemption. Images of spring, Easter, and resurrection haunt the novel, and the book's end features a priest named Peter who literally holds the keys of a possible new life. And there's a final confession of humility which truly stands out in American literature (something else it shares with "The Crack-Up.") Lest anyone think it's a complete downer, it's often grimly funny in the way rather harrowing irony can be. I snickered and squirmed all the way through the Andrew Crawford episodes; they're like horrible outtakes from "American Pie" movies. If you can take a high dose of tragedy, that burns as it heals, then "The Easter Parade" is for you.

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A Masterwork From a True Master
There is nothing that I can say about Yates that has not been previously articulated adoringly on this site. Suffice to say that it is a true tragedy that his works are not more easily available for consumption by the public. <
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>I assess a bookstore's quality by whether or not it shelves one of Yates' works. Read this book and you will know why. <
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