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Title: The Easter Parade: A Novel
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Manufacturer: Picador
List Price: $14.00
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| The Easter Parade: A Novel by Picador Forlorn, forsaken, whatever, I don't really care | David Sedaris recommended "The Easter Parade" by Richard Yates on his latest book tour. He really made it sound like a bitter, sour adventure into the lives of two sisters that could satisfy everyone's sado-masochistic side.
Perhaps my review falls under the category of false pretenses, because I found "The Easter Parade" to be pretty vacuous. A majority of it was an easy read, but the character of Emily has fling after fling after fling with these rotten men who do nothing to advance the story. Just when I start to get tired of her pointless relationships, she has a few more. Tedious!
I'm not complaining that "The Easter Parade" is no fun, but it's not devastating either. It doesn't seem to be much of anything, just lying there moving neither forward nor back. This is my first Richard Yates book and it's possible that it's not indicative of his style, but I was overall glad to be done with it. | | The Easter Parade: A Novel by Picador 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.
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."
A good book. (And tonight, I'll skip that nightcap.)
| | The Easter Parade: A Novel by Picador 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, 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, 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 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.
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 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. | | The Easter Parade: A Novel by Picador 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.
I assess a bookstore's quality by whether or not it shelves one of Yates' works. Read this book and you will know why.
| | The Easter Parade: A Novel by Picador One of the best books I've ever read | | This book is just another reason why Richard Yates is one of my favorite authors. The amazing opening lines, the great characters, the conflict, the overall "realness" of everything that's going on. Amazing. | | The Easter Parade: A Novel by Picador Product Description | In The Easter Parade, first published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.
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