The Easter Parade: A Novel

"Easter Parade" follows sisters, Emily and Sarah Grimes, over forty years. They enter adulthood during WWII, and their lives follow tremendously different trajectories. Sarah is the traditional one: she marries early, has three children, and settles into a seemingly idyllic life in the countryside. Emily is more independent, and she experiences a series of unsatisfying intimate relationships and drifts through life. The novel chiefly concerns the relationship, or lack thereof, between the sisters and their family. The story climaxes in the 1960's with mild invocations of the women's liberation movement, and Yates draws clear parallels between the sisters and their times. Although the time period is specific, the characters remain amazingly relatable and universal.

The most exceptional aspect of Yates's writing is the effortlessness with which he encapsulates life: "The Easter Parade" is a relatively short novel - yet it's remarkably complete due to Yates's talent in creating scenes that so clearly recapitulate a particular period in the sisters' lives. Yates is best-known for his brilliant debut, "Revolutionary Road." His subsequent novels have received considerably less acclaim - an untenable situation considering the quality and exquisiteness of his writing. With "The Easter Parade" the story is simple but heart-breaking; the characters are unforgettable; the final epiphany is indisputable. Most highly recommended.

Having recently finished Revolutionary Road (and loving every page of it), I picked up The Easter Parade. People have told me that it was a better book than Rev Road, to which I thought: "How could it possibly surpass it?"

It does, and does so without much fanfare. EP is a quieter book than RR, and initially that quietness let me down. It was missing RR's raw energy, that relentless, menacing, racing-to-a-head-on-collision-at-90-mph feeling, maybe because so much time passes in this thin novel -- a good forty years. But as I got to the last page and ruminated on Emily Grimes' and her family's tragic lives, I realized that EP is the better book because it doesn't do anything too spectacular (the ending of RR could be seen as a bit melodramatic, especially after EP).

After finishing it, I flipped through the pages again and again, admiring these heartbreaking passages strewn throughout. I was amazed at how much time does indeed pass in about two hundred pages, and yet not for a second did I feel like I was getting a Reader's Digest version of Emily's life. Yates marvelously intersperses perfect quick scenes in between summarizations, never making it boring.

Unlike RR, EP doesn't have any cartoonish supporting characters. Everyone in this book is real. Their pain is real, especially Emily's. You will learn to care for her, even when she's doing something horrifyingly stupid or cruel, or perhaps because of it. Her faults are our own; they belong to all of us.

My God, how did Richard Yates fall between the cracks? This is an excellent novel, a compelling story told with seamless, word-perfect writing. Yet, as an avid reader of contemporary literature for at least 15 years now, I had not heard of Yates until very recently. After relishing "The Easter Parade," I intend to hunt down all of Yates' books. Which is not a simple task, since he's mostly out of print and hard to find even in the better used bookstores. "The Easter Parade" excels in at least two ways. First, it is extremely well written. Yates is not a flashy writer. His sentences are grammatically perfect and tightly crafted. There are no wasted or throwaway words. He stays out of the way of the story, which can be the hardest thing for a writer to do. Second, Yates crafts believable characters who live realistic, plausible lives. This could be a recipe for boring, but Yates deftly keeps the narrative moving at a brisk pace, covering about 45 years in 225 pages. Here's hoping for a Richard Yates revival, akin to the recent resurgence of interest in Charles Portis.

This is firat rate Richard Yates. He passed through his own time little noticed. He was not political or experimental enough for the sixties. Yet here is Easter Parade back in print, and Yates is more relevant today than the "relevant" writers of those days.

Yates' characters tend to be members of the WW II generation. They are not heros. They are not rich. They are not particularly gifted. Yates' characters are flawed, fragile people. Not overly sensitive, just fragile and flawed. In their flaws we see ourselves.

Yates writes of these people with an honesty, fairness and humor that rises above the simple stories he tells. While every Yates story is on one level a tragedy, the journey is always enjoyable and illuminating. This is one you can read over and over again.

Yates is not about how the "system" grinds us down. He is about how we grind ourselves down, every day, with our self-deception and our ridiculous dreams. His vision is real, true and liberating. If we could just stop being ourselves, this whole thing might go much better.

This is the mystery of Richard Yates: how did a writer so well-respected? even loved? by his peers,
a writer capable of moving his readers so deeply, fall for all intents out of print, and so quickly?
How is it possible that an author whose work defined the lostness of the Age of Anxiety as deftly as
Fitzgeraldýs did that of the Jazz Age, an author who influenced American literary icons like
Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus, among others, an author so forthright and plainspoken in his
prose and choice of characters, can now be found only by special order or in the dusty, floor-level
end of the fiction section in secondhand stores? And how come no one knows this? How come no
one does anything about it?
-Stewart O'Nan, The Lost World of Richard Yates (Boston Review)

Well, as it turns out, O'Nan did do something about. His essay, and similar proselytizing by Richard
Russo, got Yates back into print and earned the recent release of his Collected Stories genuine big
event status, with reviews and reappraisals in all the leading papers and journals. For now at least,
he's been rediscovered and restored to an exalted position. But if you read The Easter Parade, it's easy
to see why he faded away so fast; this isn't the kind of book that the intelligentsia would want people
reading, nor would they care to continue to face its ugly truths themselves.

In one of the most depressing opening lines you'd ever want to read, Yates let's the reader know
exactly what he's in for, and why :

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the
trouble began with their parents' divorce.

The promise of the 60s was that the abandonment of traditional morality, family structures, traditions,
and beliefs would have a liberating effect and make all our lives better. But Yates proceeds instead to
show just how catastrophic these changes were. The older Grimes sister, Sarah, marries a man who
looks like Laurence Olivier, and despite an outwardly happy and comfortable life, ends up being
battered as they teeter on the brink of financial ruin.

Younger sister Emily becomes little more than a slattern, scrumping in parks and waking with
strangers, though she does have a couple of longer term relationships.

The troubles of both can be traced directly to the divorce of their parents. When Emily finds out that
her sister is being beaten by her husband, Sarah tells her :

It's a marriage. If you want to stay married you learn to put up with things.

Emily's prototypical affair is with Ted Banks :

...both felt an urge to drink too much when they were together, as if they didn't want to touch each
other sober.

The one sister is so desperate to hold her marriage together that she'll endure anything. The other is
so afraid of being rejected that she has to have serial relationships and to erect a haze of booze
between herself and her men.

The story is, in fact, soaked in alcohol. And it becomes clear that people use drink to avoid their real
selves, each other, and genuine interaction. It turns out that the "freedom" they've theoretically
gained has made them miserable, is even killing them.

Towards the end of the novel, after Sarah has apparently, though not officially, been killed by her
husband, one of her sons tells Emily :

'You know something? I've always admired you, Aunt Emmy. My mother used to say "Emmy's a
free spirit." I didn't know what that meant when I was little, so I asked her once. And she said
"Emmy doesn't care what anybody thinks. She's her own person and she goes her own way."

The walls of Emily's throat closed up. When she felt it was safe to speak she said 'Did she really
say that?'

Of course she's proud, an older sister pronouncing that she'd realized the dream of their generation, to
be free. But we, the readers, are privy to the awful truth : she's utterly alone, her past wasted, her
future hopeless, alcohol killing her as it killed her mother and father, and contributed to the death of
her sister. The hard won kudos of which she is so proud reads like a death sentence, not just for her,
but for all who thought that this atomized life would make them happy.

The book is exactly as depressing as it sounds like it would be, though there is much dark humor in
it. The story is direct and economical, covering the two women's lives in just over two hundred
pages. Most of all, it is devastating, a brutally honest depiction of tragic choices and truly empty
lives. No wonder he went out of print, the folks who foisted this culture on us were just destroying
the evidence, the way any guilt-ridden perps would..

GRADE : A