It shows an artist at the height of his talent. The Easter Parade, in which Emily decides to be an intellectual because 'an intellectual might have a mother who showed her underpants when drunk, but … wouldn't let it bother her,' was published in 1976, in the middle of Yates's career.

Even as downbeat a person as Joyce Carol Oates considered Yates's fictional milieu 'a sad, gray, deathly world.' The fact that he manages to exhilarate and inspire in spite of this is his glory. And that next drink is never far from disaster. Whether trying to be a career woman in Manhattan like Emmy, planning bohemian lives in Europe like Frank and April in Revolutionary Road, or trying to be artistic free-thinkers like Lucy and Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying, Yates's people are never far from their next drink. Reading Blake Bailey's biography of the author, A Tragic Honesty, one realises that almost every doomed character has sprung full-blown from Yates's own life.Īlcohol runs through Yates's work like the lucky breaks through his protagonists' fingers. Sarah marries a man who beats her Yates's sister did, too.

In A Special Providence, the hero's ghastly, fantasy-riddled mother makes bad art and fails to sell real estate, as did the author's own. In The Easter Parade, he calls the mother Pookie his own was Dookie. The last for Yates is often from an overbearing alcoholic artist-manqué of a mother, a mother much like his own. Like almost every protagonist in a Yates novel, Emily yearns for love, success, escape. Describing the girls' snobbish, deluded mother, he cites her responding to a man's 'every minor witticism, and then she'd dissolve into peals of deep-throated laugher, pressing her middle finger coquettishly against her upper lip to conceal the fact that her gums were shrinking and her teeth going bad.' He nails people with just a few words strips them bare with a single phrase. The author's clear eye and stark language provoke not just admiration for his skills but empathy for his characters. Since this is Richard Yates, the promise turns out to be empty and the girls' dreams flutter and die, but between that Easter and the springtime decades later when the book ends, lies a heartbreaking story delivered in prose as exquisite as it is seemingly offhand. Sarah dresses up to take part in New York's Easter Parade with her handsome fiancé and her younger sibling Emily watches, giddy with the promise life holds. The Easter in question isn't, as that holiday usually is, symbolic of renewal instead, it stands for the last innocent days in the lives of two sisters. Joan Didion called The Easter Parade 'Yates's best novel', and it's my favourite, too.

The easter parade by richard yates