The Easter Parade: A Novel

The Easter Parade tells the story of the very different lives of two sisters, Sarah and Emily. Their childhood is spent with their overbearing mother, Pookie, with occasional visits from their distant father. Sarah grows up to lead the apparently perfect life of a 1950s housewife and mother, but her husband turns out to be abusive and violent. Emily has a career and a more adventurous life in the city, but this life also brings loneliness and a series of relationships that are often painful or unfulfilling.I loved this book for its ironic humour and the understated style, which somehow conveys the sadness of the characters’ lives and only makes its emotional impact greater. The extremely realistic, often comic characterization and dialogue show the author’s huge gift for observation and I sympathised completely with Emily’s aspirations and disillusionments (the book is mostly written from her point of view). The book interestingly portrays the relationship between the two sisters, which includes rivalry but also an affection and closeness which they rarely express. I feel the book also suggests how easy it is to drift through life not really understanding the meaning or implications of what we do. Although it is undeniably bleak, I find this book exhilarating for its unrestrained exploration of the disappointments and pain of life, and for its beautiful writing, especially the perfect final scene.

Hoewel herontdekt sinds Revolutionary Road als film uitkwam, blijft Yates een onderschat schrijver. In dit boek beschrijft hij de levensloop van twee zussen. Sarah houdt het op een traditioneel huwelijk en gezin, maar gaat ten onder aan huiselijk geweld, drankmisbruik en eenzaamheid. Emily lijkt - ook in onze 21ste eeuwse ogen - beter af want vrijgevochten, zelfbewust en zelfs in bescheiden mate succesrijk in haar carriere. Maar ook haar vergaat het uiteindelijk niet goed. Er zit weinig om vrolijk van te worden in dit verhaal. Het leven, zeker ook in de goedogende moderne versie, is maar een tranendal, is de boodschap. En Yates brengt die in een zeer onderkoelde, ingehouden stijl, om het troosteloze nog wat dikker in de verf te zetten. Minder dramatische panache dan in Revolutionary Road dus, maar zeker niet minder beklijvend!

Spoiler alertAfter reading and loving Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, I was pretty geeked to get a copy of The Easter Parade through LT’s early reviewers’ group. I love a good story about suburban angst as much as anybody, but that’s not really what The Easter Parade delivers.Instead, I couldn’t help but read the novel as a misogynistic parable about what happens to women who don’t marry into traditional, suburban households.Following a divorce in the 1930s, “Pookie” Grimes wanders the wastelands of New York suburbia with her daughters, unable to accomplish much for herself except develop a chronic drinking problem. She eventually goes mad, gets “hospitalized” and dies after years of commitment. Elder daughter Sarah, the “pretty one,” marries and has three kids, but her husband, who we’re reminded, never graduated college, abuses her both physically and mentally. In fact, when she dies, it’s not entirely clear whether it’s from cirrhosis (brought on by her own drinking problem) or from a beating at the hands of her husband.Younger daughter and main character Emily has one sordid affair after another, forever hooking up with losers and liars, and never marrying. In a telling scene, she’s been out of work for nearly a year and desperately lonely. When she calls up an old friend and gets invited to a small party, Emily’s first thought is that there might be a man there for her.The section focusing on Emily’s love life must have been even more shocking when the novel was first written, with the kind of casual, oft-drunken sex that is, if not more commonplace now, then at least more written about now. Which makes Emily’s life an even starker comment on the inability of single women to be happy without marriage.As disappointment follows disappointment for Emily, there is another scene in which she comes across a photo of her sister that had appeared in the newspaper when the latter was in her late teens. Sarah was dressed up for the local Easter parade, and is posing with her nattily attired boyfriend, the guy who would eventually become her husband. To Emily, the picture represents some kind of apotheosis of happiness.And at the end of the book, alone and out of work, she turns to one of her nephews, an Episcopalian minister, for solace—and finds it. Which brings up the most troubling part of the novel for me. Despite an anti-suburban rant from Emily to the nephew as he’s driving her to his home, the fact is that the only place she can find any release from her bitterly disappointing life is in a suburban setting with perhaps the most traditional kind of family there is: a minister, his happy wife, and young children. And she acknowledges this.I also have to toss in here a quibble about the way Yates handles Emily’s job. At one point, she has a steady, relatively secure position as a copywriter in an ad agency, but she mysteriously loses her writing ability, eventually gets fired, and then can’t get another job. It just seemed like an especially unlikely situation that was crafted solely to make Emily appear more desperate at the end of the novel. (Admittedly, squinting between the lines hard enough, it’s barely possible that Yates was implying Emily was fired after rejecting her female boss’ advances.)Frankly, this seemed like second-rate work from Yates.

Sarah and Emily are sisters. Yates takes us from their childhood through their middle age. He tells us in the first sentence that their lives are not easy. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't, the choice women have to make. A traditional devoted marriage, or not getting trapped. It's gritty reality throughout, mostly the New York City region, from the 1930s through the 1960s.

This older finely-written novel, originally published in 1976, is outstandingly depressing and tells about two girls growing up in a extremely troubled family. After one sister dies, the surviving (more together) sister observes: "Yes, I'm tired," she said. "And do you known a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life." Richard Yates is known best for his novel Revolutionary Road -- the film version starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. He is also known for being a dark man himself, one who lead a very troubled life of his own. I read Blake Bailey's biography of Yates, A Tragic Honesty, years ago, and it became so obvious that he was writing what he knew. The troubled, mostly middle-class, constantly drinking and smoking people that filled his books lived in the Yate's world. The two sisters in the book are very distinctive, and their lives take them in very different directions. The writing seems simple and direct, as Yates describes the decisions they each make, but there is a brutal side to the book when he reveals the heartache and the violence around the suburban sister, Sarah, and her unhappy marriage. Her sister, Emily is a much more independent woman, always worked in the city, and had many lovers and relationships, but her life has many problems of its own. The storyline still swirls around in my mind. It took me many years to finally read this novel, and I agree with Joan Didion, when she declared it to be her favorite Yate's novel. His fiction is painful to read, but the writing always reveals itself to be so well crafted and worth it._____

If you're looking for light hearted, happy-go-lucky tales that end with a smile, steer clear of Richard Yates. He's a serious writer who wasn't afraid of shining the light on uncomfortable subjects. In The Easter Parade, a story of two sisters who take separate, rocky paths in search of happiness, Yates makes very real the challenges of divorce, parenting, dating, sex in the days of "pre-liberation," alcoholism, domestic violence, and mental illness. Yates is a master of capturing the wrenching and at times painful emotions woven through all of those subjects, which many found difficult to discuss; certainly during the time period covered in this book, 1940s to 1970s. Don't read this book as any kind of curative, but if you've struggled finding Mr/Ms Right, felt lost, waded through a less than ideal life, you may find a little kinship with the Grimes sisters. Once you start, Yates will certainly draw you in with engaging dialog and his clear observations on the human condition.