A Special Providence (Vintage Contemporaries)

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the ultimate choice any man had to make before becomming an adult--is described here with more sympathy for the mother than Yates was later to do.

I do not enjoy war writing so I do not know if it was good or bad, but the character of the mother rang true on many levels - how hard it is to pursue the arts and be a reasonable parent---it did not really matter if she was talented or not--the relationship would have still been complicated, but her mediocrity made it even sadder.

Yates can make something unbearable pleasurable---that is becasue of his brilliance as a writer.

It is no rev road--- that was the masterwork--this is a chamber piece - both are important for serious readers to partake of.

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A sensitively written chronicle of two lives in parallel, based on the author's own life experiences. The war scenes are stirring and have an authentic air about them that only someone who has experienced war first hand could convey. Despite the fact that Yates himself expressed disappointment with this work, I was surprised to find it so gripping. I highly recommend this book to anyone who admires Richard Yates based on his more famous novel, Revolutionary Road.

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Reading Blake Bailey's biography of novelist Richard Yates (A Tragic Honesty) helped me understand the stories behind the novels--and so, better understand the novels themselves. Not only the real-life bases for so many situations and details within Yates's novels (his work was unabashedly autobiographical); but also the circumstances in which much of the writing took place.

A Special Providence, which followed Revolutionary Road and a story collection called Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, presented Richard Yates with two challenges. It was Yates's second novel, the classic potential pitfall for a novelist with one successful book under his belt: Can he pull it off again? The other challenge was that Yates had not one but two parallel stories he wanted to tell. First, he wanted to deal with his claustrophobic relationship with his mother; and second, he wanted to write about being a square peg, as usual, as a soldier in World War II.

Yates struggled with this novel for a very long time, and the critical response when it finally arrived was not favorable overall. Most critics found fault--appropriately, I think--with Yates's attempt to integrate the two stories with the device of a prologue, two parts, 1 and 2; and an epilogue. But it's a far stronger book than I was led to expect.

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This one was the perfect cap to the Yates collection for me ... mostly because now I can begin rereading his masterful collection, but also because it dealt with (I suspect) his time in the Army during the close of WWII. The back and forth, mom and son, worked well and Yates ability with open endings is overwhelming. Perhaps, the most underappreciated American writer ever, Yates is a pure pleasure to read. He knows how to touch on every single thread of the human condition and to make it vibrate so it can't be ignored.

Rating:

Not enough can be said about Yates. In my mind he is probably the best American writer as I can't think of anyone who comes close to his word magic!