The Easter Parade: A Novel

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What I Liked:

-The amount of time covered (~40 years)
-How the author dealt with the passage of time
-The ending
-The non-judgmental, matter-of-fact quality of the prose style
-That I was not made to feel sorry for anyone/anything in the book based on passages of rhetoric

What I Didn't Like:

-Details/prose seemed almost too sparse sometimes

Rating:

The Easter Parade is another great psychological novel by Richard Yates in the vein of Revolutionary Road. This time, rather than skewer a dysfunctional suburban couple, he takes on the life of a single city girl, Emily Grimes, showing us her life from childhood to middle age. Emily and her sister, Sarah, are continuously moved around by their restless and ineffective mother, Pookie, who has left their father to get more out of life. Not surprisingly Sarah and Emily both leave Pookie as soon as they can, with Emily going to college and Sarah running off with her British lover, Tony, to get married and live in the suburbs in Tony's parent's large estate.

But Emily cannot run away from her past so easily. Beginning with a stranger who picks her up across from her Washington Square apartment and takes her virginity in the shadows of Central Park, Emily has a number of bad relationships with men. Choosing her father's template to fill the void his absence has left inside her, she goes after intellectual but emotionally stunted men. These types are not hard for Emily to find, first in college, and then in fifties and sixties New York City. At a young age, she marries an older professor with impotence issues, but leaves him after he plays out his own psychological aggressions on her. She moves to Iowa with a poet, but soon realizes something is missing there too.

Meanwhile, her family and friends see Emily as the modern, free-spirited woman- the model of women's liberation- simply because she is single and has a job. Sarah especially finds Emily so, a feeling probably enhanced by the huge cracks in her own suburban familial bliss and frustrated dreams. Sarah is shown here as a perfect contrast to Emily, not just in the suburban/urban and married/single dichotomies. Sarah has her own dreams to write and envies Emily because she has the freedom to do what Sarah would like to do. (Emily is an ad-writer.) Sarah eventually begins to act this out on Emily with little reminiscences of talks she had with their father, little stabs at Emily reminding her that Sarah was their father's favorite. Little does Sarah know that Emily too starts writing she never finishes, she too has frustrated dreams. In fact, as life rolls on, Emily is not so sure she's leading the life she wants at all. She's not sure what this supposed freedom has gotten her. After one failed relationship after another and a job that is not as satisfying as it once was, Emily finds herself alone, an unrecognizable shell.

Yates' writing is superb. His prose is crisp and clean, and the style is the perfect blend of classical and modern psychological works: you can see both Eliot and Dostoyevsky as influences here. He tells us the events of Emily's life, but it's the details he shows us that tell the story. We feel for Emily (and Sarah too) from the very first sentence. From the very first sentence we know things won't end well for either of them, but we are drawn forward by the words. Almost fifty years of Emily's life flies by in this short novel, a reminder of the transitory nature of life, a reminder that in a blink of an eye, years are gone for good.

Yates is the ultimate in enjoyable and intellectually rich reading. I'm glad the Revolutionary Road movie finally brought this important writer much deserved appreciation.

Rating:

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates follows two sisters, Emily and Sarah, through the course of their lives. We are immediately told they will not have happy lives. Yates suggests that the chief defining moment that alters their lives is the divorce of their parents. Thus this early disintegration of the family dooms these girls from the start.

The two sisters take two different tracks in life. The older sister Sarah falls in love and commits (unlike her parents) to a very handsome man who looks like Laurence Olivier. The younger sister Emily tries to find the right man. Sarah stays in her marriage. We find out later in the novel that her husband is physically abusive. Emily on the other hand goes from man to man dealing with their inadequacies. They drag her down. Eventually they leave her or she leaves them. Yates I suppose is telling us that human relationships are doomed.

In the middle of the novel, Emily and Sarah try to move off their chosen paths. Emily tries to settle down with a lawyer. Sarah tries to be independent like Emily. But the Lawyer is hung up on a younger girl- his former wife, and Sarah has no education or skills to leap into the work force. They obviously fail.

What's the solution? Yates of course never does say, nor do you get any glimpse of any answer. I think the title The Easter Parade is more ironic than anything. What Easter? What renewals occur in the book? Yates even lampoons the women's movement of the seventies as well. There is no hope there either.

I liked this novel. It starts out very well, and I kept thinking why doesn't anyone write like this anymore. On the other hand the novel never really came together. We don't get any good insights into psychology. The divorce of both girls' parents doesn't really explain anything (I think it's meant to) about why they are completely unable to connect to other human beings. The novel notes that the parents get a divorce because the mother wants to pursue her own life. Does Yates see this as selfish? Does pursuing one's own life make one too selfish? Or is it lack of religion? The Easter Parade is a sham Easter, where vanity is more important than the message of religion. Is that why only Peter is happy? He doesn't have to connect to anything human. But he is so peripheral to the story that the message is lost. The book is well written but very, very poorly executed. Yates doesn't have the literary powers to weave together his vision. His power ends with making beautiful sentences and sometimes gorgeously written scenes. In the end, the book is more like a better written version of The Imitation of Life.

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I am very satisfied about receiving the book "The Easter Parade" by Richard Yates. The book is in a very good condition and it was delivered in a very timely fashion.

Thank you.

Rita Jerins

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Richard Yates is such a talented author and this book was a fine example. A quick, interesting read that I thoroughly enjoyed even though it was a little depressing at times.