Originally published in 1961 to great critical acclaim, Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road subsequently fell into obscurity in the UK, only to be rediscovered in a new edition published in 2001. Its rejuvenation is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership. April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled or happy in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paid but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. However, as their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfilment are thrown into jeopardy. Yates's incisive, moving and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs now seem quaintly dated--the early evening cocktails, Frank's illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn't averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn all seem to belong to a different world--and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did 40 years ago. Like F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the poverty at the soul of many wealthy Americans and the exacting cost of chasing the American Dream. --Jane Morris

Exquisite, 09 Oct 2008
There are few writers that can match Yates and this story, of the few I've read (I've resisted the desperate urge to devour them all too quickly) excels beyond so many other writer's work. The comparison drawn with Fitzgerald is right but I would say that Yates is better, more consistent. If you find Fitzgerald frustrating, Yates will show you why better than anyone; if you love Fitzgerald, you will worship this! If you like your books beautifully moving, exquisitely sad and sensual with sharp, dark humour that bites, then it doesn't get better than this. Yates' writing never puts a foot a wrong and from the outset you know you are in safe hands. It's one that shifts your perspective on life and left me fizzing for months, thankful that I found it and disappointed that I can't discover it again.

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road, 30 Aug 2008
Revolutionary Road deserves all the praise and adulation it's had over the years. Rarely are two protagonists so heartbreakingly real, rarely are they so convincing as living, breathing human beings stuck in the monotonous machine of life, yearning to escape, to break free. Yates advances their arc, their developments and realisations and dreams, brilliantly, and conveys relationship breakdown as realistically as Ian McEwan. This is a great indictment of the American way of life, where individuality and humanity is so easily stifled, and also a strange defense of it. There are times when Frank is happy, and it is only when they strive to break free that things gang agly. And the only person who empathises with the Wheelers is mad.

A great book, full of the kind of brilliant writing that makes you startled to realise you're actually reading. Very sad, but full of warm compassion. There's no way you'll regret reading it.

A great novel, 14 Aug 2008
I don't want to repeat what most of the other reviewers have written. They are correct - it is a very good novel. The film will help sales. It pre-dates the later Rabbit books by Updike which cover, in some ways, similar ground but I wish I had read this earlier and before Updike (and I did Amer. Lit. at university - no one mentioned Yates!). I was too young in 1961 to read this but those that did then must have realised what a remarkable book it is; maybe today we are used to this kind of theme/writing but then? The question is: would you recommend this book to a young person starting out on life (it might be a real life turn-off for them!)or a person near retirement who might shrug and say: "Yeah, we all had dreams but some times they don't always work out"?

Understand the modern world, 06 Aug 2008
If you want to get an insight into the break down of family life and the obsession with celebrity and appearance in the post modern world then look no further. The need to be different in the ridiculous stylised modern world of work is covered with great insight. Love and the lust underneath it for what we don't have are there too. Everyone might be flawed in some way but don't worry about that as it's a great read from start to finish.

Well Travelled Road, 20 Jul 2008
Richard Yates's novel "Revolutionary Road" has developed a cult following in recent years, and a forthcoming film adaptation will no doubt only add further to the interest in what has been widely dubbed a "neglected masterpiece".

"Revolutionary Road" tells the story of an attractive young couple, April and Frank Wheeler, who live in a desirable suburb with their two children. Frank commutes into the city where he works for Knox Business Machines, while April is a housewife and mother. The novel, written in the early sixties, is set in the mid-fifties, and outwardly the Wheelers are the epitome of a wholesome American couple.

But the novel opens with a disastrous amateur theatrical performance in which April plays the lead. She has nurtured dreams of being an actress, and the shattering of these dreams sets in motion a series of events that lead to the tragic unravelling of the Wheeler marriage.

For its time, Richard Yates's novel was ground-breaking, but I can only review it as a modern reader in the present day. The idea that beneath the suburban ideal lurks a tangled web of discontent is the clearly declared theme early in the novel, and thereafter the plot develops along familiar lines. One can credit Yates with being ahead of his time, but whether that makes the reading experience more enjoyable or compelling is a matter of opinion. The recent TV series "Mad Men", for example, dealt with the same theme in a more surprising and oblique fashion.

Overall, this is an important novel, which deserves its long-awaited recognition, but I'm reluctant to recommend it as a worthwhile reading experience over more contemporary work that addresses the same issues.

Exquisite, 09 Oct 2008
There are few writers that can match Yates and this story, of the few I've read (I've resisted the desperate urge to devour them all too quickly) excels beyond so many other writer's work. The comparison drawn with Fitzgerald is right but I would say that Yates is better, more consistent. If you find Fitzgerald frustrating, Yates will show you why better than anyone; if you love Fitzgerald, you will worship this! If you like your books beautifully moving, exquisitely sad and sensual with sharp, dark humour that bites, then it doesn't get better than this. Yates' writing never puts a foot a wrong and from the outset you know you are in safe hands. It's one that shifts your perspective on life and left me fizzing for months, thankful that I found it and disappointed that I can't discover it again.

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road, 30 Aug 2008
Revolutionary Road deserves all the praise and adulation it's had over the years. Rarely are two protagonists so heartbreakingly real, rarely are they so convincing as living, breathing human beings stuck in the monotonous machine of life, yearning to escape, to break free. Yates advances their arc, their developments and realisations and dreams, brilliantly, and conveys relationship breakdown as realistically as Ian McEwan. This is a great indictment of the American way of life, where individuality and humanity is so easily stifled, and also a strange defense of it. There are times when Frank is happy, and it is only when they strive to break free that things gang agly. And the only person who empathises with the Wheelers is mad.

A great book, full of the kind of brilliant writing that makes you startled to realise you're actually reading. Very sad, but full of warm compassion. There's no way you'll regret reading it.

A great novel, 14 Aug 2008
I don't want to repeat what most of the other reviewers have written. They are correct - it is a very good novel. The film will help sales. It pre-dates the later Rabbit books by Updike which cover, in some ways, similar ground but I wish I had read this earlier and before Updike (and I did Amer. Lit. at university - no one mentioned Yates!). I was too young in 1961 to read this but those that did then must have realised what a remarkable book it is; maybe today we are used to this kind of theme/writing but then? The question is: would you recommend this book to a young person starting out on life (it might be a real life turn-off for them!)or a person near retirement who might shrug and say: "Yeah, we all had dreams but some times they don't always work out"?

Understand the modern world, 06 Aug 2008
If you want to get an insight into the break down of family life and the obsession with celebrity and appearance in the post modern world then look no further. The need to be different in the ridiculous stylised modern world of work is covered with great insight. Love and the lust underneath it for what we don't have are there too. Everyone might be flawed in some way but don't worry about that as it's a great read from start to finish.

Well Travelled Road, 20 Jul 2008
Richard Yates's novel "Revolutionary Road" has developed a cult following in recent years, and a forthcoming film adaptation will no doubt only add further to the interest in what has been widely dubbed a "neglected masterpiece".

"Revolutionary Road" tells the story of an attractive young couple, April and Frank Wheeler, who live in a desirable suburb with their two children. Frank commutes into the city where he works for Knox Business Machines, while April is a housewife and mother. The novel, written in the early sixties, is set in the mid-fifties, and outwardly the Wheelers are the epitome of a wholesome American couple.

But the novel opens with a disastrous amateur theatrical performance in which April plays the lead. She has nurtured dreams of being an actress, and the shattering of these dreams sets in motion a series of events that lead to the tragic unravelling of the Wheeler marriage.

For its time, Richard Yates's novel was ground-breaking, but I can only review it as a modern reader in the present day. The idea that beneath the suburban ideal lurks a tangled web of discontent is the clearly declared theme early in the novel, and thereafter the plot develops along familiar lines. One can credit Yates with being ahead of his time, but whether that makes the reading experience more enjoyable or compelling is a matter of opinion. The recent TV series "Mad Men", for example, dealt with the same theme in a more surprising and oblique fashion.

Overall, this is an important novel, which deserves its long-awaited recognition, but I'm reluctant to recommend it as a worthwhile reading experience over more contemporary work that addresses the same issues.

A spare yet wrenching tale, 29 Feb 2008
Here we have a less known great author whose every word, every sentence, is packed with meaning and art. Mr. Yates must be the Flaubert of 20th Century writers in his near perfectly written and readable books. This one has just about everything. The two sisters of the divorced parents grow up under a cloud of parental dissolution, but by late adolescence seem on their way to happiness and security. The older marries of the British "Boy Next Door" (Actually upstairs), the younger is awarded a full scholarship to Barnard, no mean feat. With excursions throughout the NYC area, including a visit to the father's newspaper building, the village,etc. we slowly see how these lives deteriorate into a bad marriage, and too many sad relationships. Maybe a bit gloomy, but not without its humour, including a very odd women's group, this is a very breezy and easy read, with more insights than you can usually find in a much longer family saga.

the easter parade, 29 Jun 2007
The Easter Parade can be seen as a bleak novel in that great swathes of sadness, loneliness and ugliness permeate through the protagonists' lives. Much of this is due to Yates's simple, matter-of-fact style. He relates the story in a no-frills way, so that the utter pointlessness of life pokes through like a bony white toe through a threadbare sock. He rarely dwells on events and in many ways skims over the joys - motherhood, aunthood, love, friendship - that punctuate life. Seen from this vantage point, any life might appear bleak: the bitter-sweetness of childhood, the disappointment of finding that noone is perfect, the vileness of physically and emotionally cruel people, serial monogamy which, if a person ends up single, can be seen pessimistically as a series of failures, the ant-like way we live, scurry around and then die. That Yates manages to make the novel not only readable but also mesmerising is testament to his powers as a story teller. In Yates's hands, less does mean more, his pared-down style and conscious absence of literary gymnastics resulting in story-telling that is simultaneously easy to digest and hugely satisfying.

The story follows the lives of two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, daughters of divorced parents, born in 1921 and 1925 respectively. Growing up with their flighty mother with occasional visits to their idealised father, they are very different. Sarah embraces conventionality and settles down early for what she hopes is an idyllic life with English public school-educated Tony who, to her infatuated eyes, looks like a young Laurence Olivier. Emily is spikier and more independant; she samples sex before marriage and decides she rather likes it, so she follows a more (for the time) daring route in life, working and having serial relationships with men. But long-term happiness is elusive for both sisters. Throughout their lives, they keep in touch, and their sisterly relationship is as complex as sibling relationships can be, their undoubted mutual love coloured with swirls of jealousy (Emily milks her sister for stories of Sarah's relationship with her father but simmers with envy and rage at their exclusive affection) and intolerance (Emily knows she should offer her sister sanctuary from her SPOILER: violent marriage , but when it comes to the crunch, she doesn't want her current relationship threatened by Sarah's presence.


The simplicity of Yates's style is in many ways deceptive - huge themes are tackled, but with a touch so light that the ensuing thought-process is largely the reader's. This works well - rather than being force-fed processed emotions like a foie gras goose with purreed nutrients , the reader bites the crisp, uncluttered text and thinks for themselves. When Yates writes of Emily meeting her father for lunch 'she thought he looked surprisingly old as he came down the steps, wearing a raincoat that wasn't quite clean', he encapsulates succinctly the shock many people feel when they first become conscious of their ageing parents' impending mortality and their fallibility.

Of particular understated power are Emily's attempts to find love. At one point she says she doesn't know what love is, but, like most people, she keeps looking. Any person's serial relationships would appear depressing when viewed in retrospect; the hopes with which one embarks on each relationship being dashed by either one's own disillusionment or the other person's.

Perhaps the book's blackness is in part due to Yates's refusal to give in to sentimentality - he doesn't describe the little joys that characterise the good parts in a relationship or life, so that the reader is left with a skeletal sketch of the failures of each. But peering through the dark, I did catch glimpses of hope. For all Tony's grim, bigoted, veiled thuggishness and the joylessness of two of his sons, his and Sarah's middle son Peter is a ray of light, a kind, sensitive person who responds to Emily's reaching out. Even at the end, after Emily's bitter outburst, he is willing to welcome her into his home - the book's first suggestion of unconditional affection for a long time.

Powerful and understated, this is a novel that will make you think for long after you've finished.

She was always misunderstood, 08 Aug 2004
"Easter Parade" follows American 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.

Get Down, 03 Feb 2003
It's slightly cheeky of Richard Yates's publishers to put out The Easter Parade like a new book, in large format. He's been dead ten years of course, and just didn't have that Calvino-Cookson foresight to plug his drawers with half-baked doodlings on which his family could keep themselves in the manner etc. etc. after his death - what an idiot! - so The Easter Parade is actually an old novel, first published in 1976 and reissued now to cash in on the sleeper success of, well, his last reissue, Revolutionary Road.

Yates is no sentimentalist, and anyone who liked Revolutionary Road will not be expecting a laugh riot, but even so The Easter Parade is remarkably cruel and bleak. He puts his cards on the table in the opening sentence: "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life..." and the following 220 pages pore over their unhappiness in forensic detail. If this was on TV it would be called When Lives Collapse! or possibly just Endurance.

The sisters are Sarah and Emily Grimes (note Dickensian naming: grim, grime). Their parents divorce and they live with their mother, who likes them to call her Pookie. Their father has a great job in a great newspaper - or so they think, until he tells them how he's really nothing more than a low-status hack. And then dies. Sarah gets married to a grunt called Tony and quickly gets a few kids under her belt. Emily meanwhile, who is really the centre of the book, goes through a string of unsuitable relationships, all of which end badly when he leaves her (because he's impotent) or she leaves him (because he's a bore) or he leaves her (because he's bisexual and wants to explore other avenues, so to speak) or she leaves him, and so on... Meanwhile Tony is beating Sarah about, and the one time that she rings Emily wanting to leave him and move in with her, Emily puts her off because for once she's in a good relationship and doesn't want her sister cramping her brief happiness. Which doesn't last anyway, of course.

Ultimately hardly anyone gets out of the book alive, and I'm not sure if there is a tiny chink of light at the end or if I just imagined it, desperate for relief. I kept reading partly because it's brilliantly written and partly out of morbid curiosity to see what Yates would do to his little laboratory mice next. And it's not only the things that happen to the characters that is cruel, but also Yates's obvious contempt for them.

So it's hard to know what the message is in The Easter Parade (perhaps Yates would have balked at the suggestion, as Douglas Adams did: "No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book"): that life is hard and then you die? That whatever you throw at them, people will keep coming back for more? That, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, the majority of lives simply aren't worth living? The only thing it told me for sure is that yes, there is a book out there that makes Revolutionary Road look like Hi-de-Hi. (You know: the bit in chapter 4 where Frank Wheeler won the knobbly knees contest.)

Exquisite, 09 Oct 2008
There are few writers that can match Yates and this story, of the few I've read (I've resisted the desperate urge to devour them all too quickly) excels beyond so many other writer's work. The comparison drawn with Fitzgerald is right but I would say that Yates is better, more consistent. If you find Fitzgerald frustrating, Yates will show you why better than anyone; if you love Fitzgerald, you will worship this! If you like your books beautifully moving, exquisitely sad and sensual with sharp, dark humour that bites, then it doesn't get better than this. Yates' writing never puts a foot a wrong and from the outset you know you are in safe hands. It's one that shifts your perspective on life and left me fizzing for months, thankful that I found it and disappointed that I can't discover it again.

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road, 30 Aug 2008
Revolutionary Road deserves all the praise and adulation it's had over the years. Rarely are two protagonists so heartbreakingly real, rarely are they so convincing as living, breathing human beings stuck in the monotonous machine of life, yearning to escape, to break free. Yates advances their arc, their developments and realisations and dreams, brilliantly, and conveys relationship breakdown as realistically as Ian McEwan. This is a great indictment of the American way of life, where individuality and humanity is so easily stifled, and also a strange defense of it. There are times when Frank is happy, and it is only when they strive to break free that things gang agly. And the only person who empathises with the Wheelers is mad.

A great book, full of the kind of brilliant writing that makes you startled to realise you're actually reading. Very sad, but full of warm compassion. There's no way you'll regret reading it.

A great novel, 14 Aug 2008
I don't want to repeat what most of the other reviewers have written. They are correct - it is a very good novel. The film will help sales. It pre-dates the later Rabbit books by Updike which cover, in some ways, similar ground but I wish I had read this earlier and before Updike (and I did Amer. Lit. at university - no one mentioned Yates!). I was too young in 1961 to read this but those that did then must have realised what a remarkable book it is; maybe today we are used to this kind of theme/writing but then? The question is: would you recommend this book to a young person starting out on life (it might be a real life turn-off for them!)or a person near retirement who might shrug and say: "Yeah, we all had dreams but some times they don't always work out"?

Understand the modern world, 06 Aug 2008
If you want to get an insight into the break down of family life and the obsession with celebrity and appearance in the post modern world then look no further. The need to be different in the ridiculous stylised modern world of work is covered with great insight. Love and the lust underneath it for what we don't have are there too. Everyone might be flawed in some way but don't worry about that as it's a great read from start to finish.

Well Travelled Road, 20 Jul 2008
Richard Yates's novel "Revolutionary Road" has developed a cult following in recent years, and a forthcoming film adaptation will no doubt only add further to the interest in what has been widely dubbed a "neglected masterpiece".

"Revolutionary Road" tells the story of an attractive young couple, April and Frank Wheeler, who live in a desirable suburb with their two children. Frank commutes into the city where he works for Knox Business Machines, while April is a housewife and mother. The novel, written in the early sixties, is set in the mid-fifties, and outwardly the Wheelers are the epitome of a wholesome American couple.

But the novel opens with a disastrous amateur theatrical performance in which April plays the lead. She has nurtured dreams of being an actress, and the shattering of these dreams sets in motion a series of events that lead to the tragic unravelling of the Wheeler marriage.

For its time, Richard Yates's novel was ground-breaking, but I can only review it as a modern reader in the present day. The idea that beneath the suburban ideal lurks a tangled web of discontent is the clearly declared theme early in the novel, and thereafter the plot develops along familiar lines. One can credit Yates with being ahead of his time, but whether that makes the reading experience more enjoyable or compelling is a matter of opinion. The recent TV series "Mad Men", for example, dealt with the same theme in a more surprising and oblique fashion.

Overall, this is an important novel, which deserves its long-awaited recognition, but I'm reluctant to recommend it as a worthwhile reading experience over more contemporary work that addresses the same issues.

A spare yet wrenching tale, 29 Feb 2008
Here we have a less known great author whose every word, every sentence, is packed with meaning and art. Mr. Yates must be the Flaubert of 20th Century writers in his near perfectly written and readable books. This one has just about everything. The two sisters of the divorced parents grow up under a cloud of parental dissolution, but by late adolescence seem on their way to happiness and security. The older marries of the British "Boy Next Door" (Actually upstairs), the younger is awarded a full scholarship to Barnard, no mean feat. With excursions throughout the NYC area, including a visit to the father's newspaper building, the village,etc. we slowly see how these lives deteriorate into a bad marriage, and too many sad relationships. Maybe a bit gloomy, but not without its humour, including a very odd women's group, this is a very breezy and easy read, with more insights than you can usually find in a much longer family saga.

the easter parade, 29 Jun 2007
The Easter Parade can be seen as a bleak novel in that great swathes of sadness, loneliness and ugliness permeate through the protagonists' lives. Much of this is due to Yates's simple, matter-of-fact style. He relates the story in a no-frills way, so that the utter pointlessness of life pokes through like a bony white toe through a threadbare sock. He rarely dwells on events and in many ways skims over the joys - motherhood, aunthood, love, friendship - that punctuate life. Seen from this vantage point, any life might appear bleak: the bitter-sweetness of childhood, the disappointment of finding that noone is perfect, the vileness of physically and emotionally cruel people, serial monogamy which, if a person ends up single, can be seen pessimistically as a series of failures, the ant-like way we live, scurry around and then die. That Yates manages to make the novel not only readable but also mesmerising is testament to his powers as a story teller. In Yates's hands, less does mean more, his pared-down style and conscious absence of literary gymnastics resulting in story-telling that is simultaneously easy to digest and hugely satisfying.

The story follows the lives of two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, daughters of divorced parents, born in 1921 and 1925 respectively. Growing up with their flighty mother with occasional visits to their idealised father, they are very different. Sarah embraces conventionality and settles down early for what she hopes is an idyllic life with English public school-educated Tony who, to her infatuated eyes, looks like a young Laurence Olivier. Emily is spikier and more independant; she samples sex before marriage and decides she rather likes it, so she follows a more (for the time) daring route in life, working and having serial relationships with men. But long-term happiness is elusive for both sisters. Throughout their lives, they keep in touch, and their sisterly relationship is as complex as sibling relationships can be, their undoubted mutual love coloured with swirls of jealousy (Emily milks her sister for stories of Sarah's relationship with her father but simmers with envy and rage at their exclusive affection) and intolerance (Emily knows she should offer her sister sanctuary from her SPOILER: violent marriage , but when it comes to the crunch, she doesn't want her current relationship threatened by Sarah's presence.


The simplicity of Yates's style is in many ways deceptive - huge themes are tackled, but with a touch so light that the ensuing thought-process is largely the reader's. This works well - rather than being force-fed processed emotions like a foie gras goose with purreed nutrients , the reader bites the crisp, uncluttered text and thinks for themselves. When Yates writes of Emily meeting her father for lunch 'she thought he looked surprisingly old as he came down the steps, wearing a raincoat that wasn't quite clean', he encapsulates succinctly the shock many people feel when they first become conscious of their ageing parents' impending mortality and their fallibility.

Of particular understated power are Emily's attempts to find love. At one point she says she doesn't know what love is, but, like most people, she keeps looking. Any person's serial relationships would appear depressing when viewed in retrospect; the hopes with which one embarks on each relationship being dashed by either one's own disillusionment or the other person's.

Perhaps the book's blackness is in part due to Yates's refusal to give in to sentimentality - he doesn't describe the little joys that characterise the good parts in a relationship or life, so that the reader is left with a skeletal sketch of the failures of each. But peering through the dark, I did catch glimpses of hope. For all Tony's grim, bigoted, veiled thuggishness and the joylessness of two of his sons, his and Sarah's middle son Peter is a ray of light, a kind, sensitive person who responds to Emily's reaching out. Even at the end, after Emily's bitter outburst, he is willing to welcome her into his home - the book's first suggestion of unconditional affection for a long time.

Powerful and understated, this is a novel that will make you think for long after you've finished.

She was always misunderstood, 08 Aug 2004
"Easter Parade" follows American 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.

Get Down, 03 Feb 2003
It's slightly cheeky of Richard Yates's publishers to put out The Easter Parade like a new book, in large format. He's been dead ten years of course, and just didn't have that Calvino-Cookson foresight to plug his drawers with half-baked doodlings on which his family could keep themselves in the manner etc. etc. after his death - what an idiot! - so The Easter Parade is actually an old novel, first published in 1976 and reissued now to cash in on the sleeper success of, well, his last reissue, Revolutionary Road.

Yates is no sentimentalist, and anyone who liked Revolutionary Road will not be expecting a laugh riot, but even so The Easter Parade is remarkably cruel and bleak. He puts his cards on the table in the opening sentence: "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life..." and the following 220 pages pore over their unhappiness in forensic detail. If this was on TV it would be called When Lives Collapse! or possibly just Endurance.

The sisters are Sarah and Emily Grimes (note Dickensian naming: grim, grime). Their parents divorce and they live with their mother, who likes them to call her Pookie. Their father has a great job in a great newspaper - or so they think, until he tells them how he's really nothing more than a low-status hack. And then dies. Sarah gets married to a grunt called Tony and quickly gets a few kids under her belt. Emily meanwhile, who is really the centre of the book, goes through a string of unsuitable relationships, all of which end badly when he leaves her (because he's impotent) or she leaves him (because he's a bore) or he leaves her (because he's bisexual and wants to explore other avenues, so to speak) or she leaves him, and so on... Meanwhile Tony is beating Sarah about, and the one time that she rings Emily wanting to leave him and move in with her, Emily puts her off because for once she's in a good relationship and doesn't want her sister cramping her brief happiness. Which doesn't last anyway, of course.

Ultimately hardly anyone gets out of the book alive, and I'm not sure if there is a tiny chink of light at the end or if I just imagined it, desperate for relief. I kept reading partly because it's brilliantly written and partly out of morbid curiosity to see what Yates would do to his little laboratory mice next. And it's not only the things that happen to the characters that is cruel, but also Yates's obvious contempt for them.

So it's hard to know what the message is in The Easter Parade (perhaps Yates would have balked at the suggestion, as Douglas Adams did: "No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book"): that life is hard and then you die? That whatever you throw at them, people will keep coming back for more? That, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, the majority of lives simply aren't worth living? The only thing it told me for sure is that yes, there is a book out there that makes Revolutionary Road look like Hi-de-Hi. (You know: the bit in chapter 4 where Frank Wheeler won the knobbly knees contest.)

Eleven out of Ten, 14 Mar 2006
The first of many things to love about this book is the bold-as-you-like title. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness? Man goes into publisher's office:

Man: I've got this book of stories I want you to publish.

Publisher: Oh yeah? Let me see that.

Man: Try this one.

Publisher: [reading] Well, this is gloomy as hell, buddy, but there's something there. Maybe we can get them in with a cheery title, they won't know what hit 'em.

Man: I have a title.

Publisher: How many stories have you got for the book?

Man: Eleven.

Publisher: And what's your title?

Man: ...Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

Publisher: Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, buddy.

And yet - it worked. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published, and acclaimed, shortly after Revolutionary Road. Didn't sell, of course, but what do you expect? It is gloomy as hell - but there's most certainly something there. More than something: misery, humiliation, pity, desperation, weakness, ignorance, bullying - oh and loneliness. But despite all this, the stories are bright-eyed and pink-tongued. They shine or bristle with life, even if it's not the sort of life you would conceivably care to share in. This is the sort of thing you get, from the second story, The Best of Everything, about a couple who are about to get married without either really wanting to:

"She'd have time for a long talk with her mother that night, and the next morning, "bright and early" (her eyes stung at the thought of her mother's plain, happy face), they would start getting dressed for the wedding. Then the church and the ceremony, and then the reception (Would her father get drunk? Would Muriel Ketchel sulk about not being a bridesmaid?), and finally the train to Atlantic City, and the hotel. But from the hotel on she couldn't plan any more. A door would lock behind her and there would be a wild, fantastic silence, and nobody in all the world but Ralph to lead the way."

The pleasure in Yates's stories is not some sort of misanthopric delight in seeing the downtrodden trodden yet further down. His characters are unfortunate yet resilient (admittedly because sometimes they're unaware how unfortunate they are); they bear their fate with stoicism, and there are no culpably dramatic Perfect-Day-for-Bananafish endings. Even, in a rare moment of generosity, there is compassionate relief for a character at the end of his story (A Glutton for Punishment), albeit only in the sense that he gets to share his burden with his wife, rather than concealing it as he had intended to.

Whatever the pleasure, it's undeniable and unopposable, because the stories kept me reopening them - just one more - like some sort of anti-candy, as unsweet as can be but nonetheless addictive.

Exquisite, 09 Oct 2008
There are few writers that can match Yates and this story, of the few I've read (I've resisted the desperate urge to devour them all too quickly) excels beyond so many other writer's work. The comparison drawn with Fitzgerald is right but I would say that Yates is better, more consistent. If you find Fitzgerald frustrating, Yates will show you why better than anyone; if you love Fitzgerald, you will worship this! If you like your books beautifully moving, exquisitely sad and sensual with sharp, dark humour that bites, then it doesn't get better than this. Yates' writing never puts a foot a wrong and from the outset you know you are in safe hands. It's one that shifts your perspective on life and left me fizzing for months, thankful that I found it and disappointed that I can't discover it again.

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road, 30 Aug 2008
Revolutionary Road deserves all the praise and adulation it's had over the years. Rarely are two protagonists so heartbreakingly real, rarely are they so convincing as living, breathing human beings stuck in the monotonous machine of life, yearning to escape, to break free. Yates advances their arc, their developments and realisations and dreams, brilliantly, and conveys relationship breakdown as realistically as Ian McEwan. This is a great indictment of the American way of life, where individuality and humanity is so easily stifled, and also a strange defense of it. There are times when Frank is happy, and it is only when they strive to break free that things gang agly. And the only person who empathises with the Wheelers is mad.

A great book, full of the kind of brilliant writing that makes you startled to realise you're actually reading. Very sad, but full of warm compassion. There's no way you'll regret reading it.

A great novel, 14 Aug 2008
I don't want to repeat what most of the other reviewers have written. They are correct - it is a very good novel. The film will help sales. It pre-dates the later Rabbit books by Updike which cover, in some ways, similar ground but I wish I had read this earlier and before Updike (and I did Amer. Lit. at university - no one mentioned Yates!). I was too young in 1961 to read this but those that did then must have realised what a remarkable book it is; maybe today we are used to this kind of theme/writing but then? The question is: would you recommend this book to a young person starting out on life (it might be a real life turn-off for them!)or a person near retirement who might shrug and say: "Yeah, we all had dreams but some times they don't always work out"?

Understand the modern world, 06 Aug 2008
If you want to get an insight into the break down of family life and the obsession with celebrity and appearance in the post modern world then look no further. The need to be different in the ridiculous stylised modern world of work is covered with great insight. Love and the lust underneath it for what we don't have are there too. Everyone might be flawed in some way but don't worry about that as it's a great read from start to finish.

Well Travelled Road, 20 Jul 2008
Richard Yates's novel "Revolutionary Road" has developed a cult following in recent years, and a forthcoming film adaptation will no doubt only add further to the interest in what has been widely dubbed a "neglected masterpiece".

"Revolutionary Road" tells the story of an attractive young couple, April and Frank Wheeler, who live in a desirable suburb with their two children. Frank commutes into the city where he works for Knox Business Machines, while April is a housewife and mother. The novel, written in the early sixties, is set in the mid-fifties, and outwardly the Wheelers are the epitome of a wholesome American couple.

But the novel opens with a disastrous amateur theatrical performance in which April plays the lead. She has nurtured dreams of being an actress, and the shattering of these dreams sets in motion a series of events that lead to the tragic unravelling of the Wheeler marriage.

For its time, Richard Yates's novel was ground-breaking, but I can only review it as a modern reader in the present day. The idea that beneath the suburban ideal lurks a tangled web of discontent is the clearly declared theme early in the novel, and thereafter the plot develops along familiar lines. One can credit Yates with being ahead of his time, but whether that makes the reading experience more enjoyable or compelling is a matter of opinion. The recent TV series "Mad Men", for example, dealt with the same theme in a more surprising and oblique fashion.

Overall, this is an important novel, which deserves its long-awaited recognition, but I'm reluctant to recommend it as a worthwhile reading experience over more contemporary work that addresses the same issues.

A spare yet wrenching tale, 29 Feb 2008
Here we have a less known great author whose every word, every sentence, is packed with meaning and art. Mr. Yates must be the Flaubert of 20th Century writers in his near perfectly written and readable books. This one has just about everything. The two sisters of the divorced parents grow up under a cloud of parental dissolution, but by late adolescence seem on their way to happiness and security. The older marries of the British "Boy Next Door" (Actually upstairs), the younger is awarded a full scholarship to Barnard, no mean feat. With excursions throughout the NYC area, including a visit to the father's newspaper building, the village,etc. we slowly see how these lives deteriorate into a bad marriage, and too many sad relationships. Maybe a bit gloomy, but not without its humour, including a very odd women's group, this is a very breezy and easy read, with more insights than you can usually find in a much longer family saga.

the easter parade, 29 Jun 2007
The Easter Parade can be seen as a bleak novel in that great swathes of sadness, loneliness and ugliness permeate through the protagonists' lives. Much of this is due to Yates's simple, matter-of-fact style. He relates the story in a no-frills way, so that the utter pointlessness of life pokes through like a bony white toe through a threadbare sock. He rarely dwells on events and in many ways skims over the joys - motherhood, aunthood, love, friendship - that punctuate life. Seen from this vantage point, any life might appear bleak: the bitter-sweetness of childhood, the disappointment of finding that noone is perfect, the vileness of physically and emotionally cruel people, serial monogamy which, if a person ends up single, can be seen pessimistically as a series of failures, the ant-like way we live, scurry around and then die. That Yates manages to make the novel not only readable but also mesmerising is testament to his powers as a story teller. In Yates's hands, less does mean more, his pared-down style and conscious absence of literary gymnastics resulting in story-telling that is simultaneously easy to digest and hugely satisfying.

The story follows the lives of two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, daughters of divorced parents, born in 1921 and 1925 respectively. Growing up with their flighty mother with occasional visits to their idealised father, they are very different. Sarah embraces conventionality and settles down early for what she hopes is an idyllic life with English public school-educated Tony who, to her infatuated eyes, looks like a young Laurence Olivier. Emily is spikier and more independant; she samples sex before marriage and decides she rather likes it, so she follows a more (for the time) daring route in life, working and having serial relationships with men. But long-term happiness is elusive for both sisters. Throughout their lives, they keep in touch, and their sisterly relationship is as complex as sibling relationships can be, their undoubted mutual love coloured with swirls of jealousy (Emily milks her sister for stories of Sarah's relationship with her father but simmers with envy and rage at their exclusive affection) and intolerance (Emily knows she should offer her sister sanctuary from her SPOILER: violent marriage , but when it comes to the crunch, she doesn't want her current relationship threatened by Sarah's presence.


The simplicity of Yates's style is in many ways deceptive - huge themes are tackled, but with a touch so light that the ensuing thought-process is largely the reader's. This works well - rather than being force-fed processed emotions like a foie gras goose with purreed nutrients , the reader bites the crisp, uncluttered text and thinks for themselves. When Yates writes of Emily meeting her father for lunch 'she thought he looked surprisingly old as he came down the steps, wearing a raincoat that wasn't quite clean', he encapsulates succinctly the shock many people feel when they first become conscious of their ageing parents' impending mortality and their fallibility.

Of particular understated power are Emily's attempts to find love. At one point she says she doesn't know what love is, but, like most people, she keeps looking. Any person's serial relationships would appear depressing when viewed in retrospect; the hopes with which one embarks on each relationship being dashed by either one's own disillusionment or the other person's.

Perhaps the book's blackness is in part due to Yates's refusal to give in to sentimentality - he doesn't describe the little joys that characterise the good parts in a relationship or life, so that the reader is left with a skeletal sketch of the failures of each. But peering through the dark, I did catch glimpses of hope. For all Tony's grim, bigoted, veiled thuggishness and the joylessness of two of his sons, his and Sarah's middle son Peter is a ray of light, a kind, sensitive person who responds to Emily's reaching out. Even at the end, after Emily's bitter outburst, he is willing to welcome her into his home - the book's first suggestion of unconditional affection for a long time.

Powerful and understated, this is a novel that will make you think for long after you've finished.

She was always misunderstood, 08 Aug 2004
"Easter Parade" follows American 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.

Get Down, 03 Feb 2003
It's slightly cheeky of Richard Yates's publishers to put out The Easter Parade like a new book, in large format. He's been dead ten years of course, and just didn't have that Calvino-Cookson foresight to plug his drawers with half-baked doodlings on which his family could keep themselves in the manner etc. etc. after his death - what an idiot! - so The Easter Parade is actually an old novel, first published in 1976 and reissued now to cash in on the sleeper success of, well, his last reissue, Revolutionary Road.

Yates is no sentimentalist, and anyone who liked Revolutionary Road will not be expecting a laugh riot, but even so The Easter Parade is remarkably cruel and bleak. He puts his cards on the table in the opening sentence: "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life..." and the following 220 pages pore over their unhappiness in forensic detail. If this was on TV it would be called When Lives Collapse! or possibly just Endurance.

The sisters are Sarah and Emily Grimes (note Dickensian naming: grim, grime). Their parents divorce and they live with their mother, who likes them to call her Pookie. Their father has a great job in a great newspaper - or so they think, until he tells them how he's really nothing more than a low-status hack. And then dies. Sarah gets married to a grunt called Tony and quickly gets a few kids under her belt. Emily meanwhile, who is really the centre of the book, goes through a string of unsuitable relationships, all of which end badly when he leaves her (because he's impotent) or she leaves him (because he's a bore) or he leaves her (because he's bisexual and wants to explore other avenues, so to speak) or she leaves him, and so on... Meanwhile Tony is beating Sarah about, and the one time that she rings Emily wanting to leave him and move in with her, Emily puts her off because for once she's in a good relationship and doesn't want her sister cramping her brief happiness. Which doesn't last anyway, of course.

Ultimately hardly anyone gets out of the book alive, and I'm not sure if there is a tiny chink of light at the end or if I just imagined it, desperate for relief. I kept reading partly because it's brilliantly written and partly out of morbid curiosity to see what Yates would do to his little laboratory mice next. And it's not only the things that happen to the characters that is cruel, but also Yates's obvious contempt for them.

So it's hard to know what the message is in The Easter Parade (perhaps Yates would have balked at the suggestion, as Douglas Adams did: "No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book"): that life is hard and then you die? That whatever you throw at them, people will keep coming back for more? That, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, the majority of lives simply aren't worth living? The only thing it told me for sure is that yes, there is a book out there that makes Revolutionary Road look like Hi-de-Hi. (You know: the bit in chapter 4 where Frank Wheeler won the knobbly knees contest.)

Eleven out of Ten, 14 Mar 2006
The first of many things to love about this book is the bold-as-you-like title. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness? Man goes into publisher's office:

Man: I've got this book of stories I want you to publish.

Publisher: Oh yeah? Let me see that.

Man: Try this one.

Publisher: [reading] Well, this is gloomy as hell, buddy, but there's something there. Maybe we can get them in with a cheery title, they won't know what hit 'em.

Man: I have a title.

Publisher: How many stories have you got for the book?

Man: Eleven.

Publisher: And what's your title?

Man: ...Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

Publisher: Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, buddy.

And yet - it worked. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published, and acclaimed, shortly after Revolutionary Road. Didn't sell, of course, but what do you expect? It is gloomy as hell - but there's most certainly something there. More than something: misery, humiliation, pity, desperation, weakness, ignorance, bullying - oh and loneliness. But despite all this, the stories are bright-eyed and pink-tongued. They shine or bristle with life, even if it's not the sort of life you would conceivably care to share in. This is the sort of thing you get, from the second story, The Best of Everything, about a couple who are about to get married without either really wanting to:

"She'd have time for a long talk with her mother that night, and the next morning, "bright and early" (her eyes stung at the thought of her mother's plain, happy face), they would start getting dressed for the wedding. Then the church and the ceremony, and then the reception (Would her father get drunk? Would Muriel Ketchel sulk about not being a bridesmaid?), and finally the train to Atlantic City, and the hotel. But from the hotel on she couldn't plan any more. A door would lock behind her and there would be a wild, fantastic silence, and nobody in all the world but Ralph to lead the way."

The pleasure in Yates's stories is not some sort of misanthopric delight in seeing the downtrodden trodden yet further down. His characters are unfortunate yet resilient (admittedly because sometimes they're unaware how unfortunate they are); they bear their fate with stoicism, and there are no culpably dramatic Perfect-Day-for-Bananafish endings. Even, in a rare moment of generosity, there is compassionate relief for a character at the end of his story (A Glutton for Punishment), albeit only in the sense that he gets to share his burden with his wife, rather than concealing it as he had intended to.

Whatever the pleasure, it's undeniable and unopposable, because the stories kept me reopening them - just one more - like some sort of anti-candy, as unsweet as can be but nonetheless addictive.

The Best School of Writing, 14 Aug 2007
The most autobiographical novel of an author who specialises in such an approach to fiction, A Good School is not the best book by Yates but is still better than most. For those of you not yet familiar with this superb writer, can I urge you to lose no more time in discovering him? Actually this is no mean place to start an exploration of his oeuvre for although published in 1978, it takes as its inspiration Yates's own school days in the early to mid forties and much can be learnt of the author and his later preoccupations from this fictionalised account. In elegant and effortless prose Yates quickly paints a world and a cast of characters which you very rapidly find yourself caring about, the human perception and emotional honesty which typifies all his writing is here in spades. The best trick of the book is the skill with which Yates manages to evoke that dualistic approach many of us adopt in looking back on our schooldays-which as here can often be riven with feelings of inadequacy, bullying, struggles for status and personal tragedy-yet somehow still coating them with the haze of nostalgia for a lost idealism and the energy of youth. In Yates's unsentimental hands teachers and boys live and hurt, learning that the certainties of youth are anything but: school offering a glimpse of a troubled future. Recommended to all and as a stepping stone to the great Revolutionary Road and Young Hearts Crying

A Strangely Haunting Little Book, 24 May 2007
A Good School follows the lives of various characters from a group of (mostly) WASP school boys at a New England prep school in the years leading up to, and directly following Pearl Harbour. It covers similar themes to other prep school stories such as Catcher In The Rye and has a strong sense of pathos running through much of the book. A Good School is under 170 pages long so it's not an epic multi-layered story, it is however a beautifully crafted book, the prose is very tight and there's not a word out of place.

Exquisite, 09 Oct 2008
There are few writers that can match Yates and this story, of the few I've read (I've resisted the desperate urge to devour them all too quickly) excels beyond so many other writer's work. The comparison drawn with Fitzgerald is right but I would say that Yates is better, more consistent. If you find Fitzgerald frustrating, Yates will show you why better than anyone; if you love Fitzgerald, you will worship this! If you like your books beautifully moving, exquisitely sad and sensual with sharp, dark humour that bites, then it doesn't get better than this. Yates' writing never puts a foot a wrong and from the outset you know you are in safe hands. It's one that shifts your perspective on life and left me fizzing for months, thankful that I found it and disappointed that I can't discover it again.

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road, 30 Aug 2008
Revolutionary Road deserves all the praise and adulation it's had over the years. Rarely are two protagonists so heartbreakingly real, rarely are they so convincing as living, breathing human beings stuck in the monotonous machine of life, yearning to escape, to break free. Yates advances their arc, their developments and realisations and dreams, brilliantly, and conveys relationship breakdown as realistically as Ian McEwan. This is a great indictment of the American way of life, where individuality and humanity is so easily stifled, and also a strange defense of it. There are times when Frank is happy, and it is only when they strive to break free that things gang agly. And the only person who empathises with the Wheelers is mad.

A great book, full of the kind of brilliant writing that makes you startled to realise you're actually reading. Very sad, but full of warm compassion. There's no way you'll regret reading it.

A great novel, 14 Aug 2008
I don't want to repeat what most of the other reviewers have written. They are correct - it is a very good novel. The film will help sales. It pre-dates the later Rabbit books by Updike which cover, in some ways, similar ground but I wish I had read this earlier and before Updike (and I did Amer. Lit. at university - no one mentioned Yates!). I was too young in 1961 to read this but those that did then must have realised what a remarkable book it is; maybe today we are used to this kind of theme/writing but then? The question is: would you recommend this book to a young person starting out on life (it might be a real life turn-off for them!)or a person near retirement who might shrug and say: "Yeah, we all had dreams but some times they don't always work out"?

Understand the modern world, 06 Aug 2008
If you want to get an insight into the break down of family life and the obsession with celebrity and appearance in the post modern world then look no further. The need to be different in the ridiculous stylised modern world of work is covered with great insight. Love and the lust underneath it for what we don't have are there too. Everyone might be flawed in some way but don't worry about that as it's a great read from start to finish.

Well Travelled Road, 20 Jul 2008
Richard Yates's novel "Revolutionary Road" has developed a cult following in recent years, and a forthcoming film adaptation will no doubt only add further to the interest in what has been widely dubbed a "neglected masterpiece".

"Revolutionary Road" tells the story of an attractive young couple, April and Frank Wheeler, who live in a desirable suburb with their two children. Frank commutes into the city where he works for Knox Business Machines, while April is a housewife and mother. The novel, written in the early sixties, is set in the mid-fifties, and outwardly the Wheelers are the epitome of a wholesome American couple.

But the novel opens with a disastrous amateur theatrical performance in which April plays the lead. She has nurtured dreams of being an actress, and the shattering of these dreams sets in motion a series of events that lead to the tragic unravelling of the Wheeler marriage.

For its time, Richard Yates's novel was ground-breaking, but I can only review it as a modern reader in the present day. The idea that beneath the suburban ideal lurks a tangled web of discontent is the clearly declared theme early in the novel, and thereafter the plot develops along familiar lines. One can credit Yates with being ahead of his time, but whether that makes the reading experience more enjoyable or compelling is a matter of opinion. The recent TV series "Mad Men", for example, dealt with the same theme in a more surprising and oblique fashion.

Overall, this is an important novel, which deserves its long-awaited recognition, but I'm reluctant to recommend it as a worthwhile reading experience over more contemporary work that addresses the same issues.

A spare yet wrenching tale, 29 Feb 2008
Here we have a less known great author whose every word, every sentence, is packed with meaning and art. Mr. Yates must be the Flaubert of 20th Century writers in his near perfectly written and readable books. This one has just about everything. The two sisters of the divorced parents grow up under a cloud of parental dissolution, but by late adolescence seem on their way to happiness and security. The older marries of the British "Boy Next Door" (Actually upstairs), the younger is awarded a full scholarship to Barnard, no mean feat. With excursions throughout the NYC area, including a visit to the father's newspaper building, the village,etc. we slowly see how these lives deteriorate into a bad marriage, and too many sad relationships. Maybe a bit gloomy, but not without its humour, including a very odd women's group, this is a very breezy and easy read, with more insights than you can usually find in a much longer family saga.

the easter parade, 29 Jun 2007
The Easter Parade can be seen as a bleak novel in that great swathes of sadness, loneliness and ugliness permeate through the protagonists' lives. Much of this is due to Yates's simple, matter-of-fact style. He relates the story in a no-frills way, so that the utter pointlessness of life pokes through like a bony white toe through a threadbare sock. He rarely dwells on events and in many ways skims over the joys - motherhood, aunthood, love, friendship - that punctuate life. Seen from this vantage point, any life might appear bleak: the bitter-sweetness of childhood, the disappointment of finding that noone is perfect, the vileness of physically and emotionally cruel people, serial monogamy which, if a person ends up single, can be seen pessimistically as a series of failures, the ant-like way we live, scurry around and then die. That Yates manages to make the novel not only readable but also mesmerising is testament to his powers as a story teller. In Yates's hands, less does mean more, his pared-down style and conscious absence of literary gymnastics resulting in story-telling that is simultaneously easy to digest and hugely satisfying.

The story follows the lives of two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, daughters of divorced parents, born in 1921 and 1925 respectively. Growing up with their flighty mother with occasional visits to their idealised father, they are very different. Sarah embraces conventionality and settles down early for what she hopes is an idyllic life with English public school-educated Tony who, to her infatuated eyes, looks like a young Laurence Olivier. Emily is spikier and more independant; she samples sex before marriage and decides she rather likes it, so she follows a more (for the time) daring route in life, working and having serial relationships with men. But long-term happiness is elusive for both sisters. Throughout their lives, they keep in touch, and their sisterly relationship is as complex as sibling relationships can be, their undoubted mutual love coloured with swirls of jealousy (Emily milks her sister for stories of Sarah's relationship with her father but simmers with envy and rage at their exclusive affection) and intolerance (Emily knows she should offer her sister sanctuary from her SPOILER: violent marriage , but when it comes to the crunch, she doesn't want her current relationship threatened by Sarah's presence.


The simplicity of Yates's style is in many ways deceptive - huge themes are tackled, but with a touch so light that the ensuing thought-process is largely the reader's. This works well - rather than being force-fed processed emotions like a foie gras goose with purreed nutrients , the reader bites the crisp, uncluttered text and thinks for themselves. When Yates writes of Emily meeting her father for lunch 'she thought he looked surprisingly old as he came down the steps, wearing a raincoat that wasn't quite clean', he encapsulates succinctly the shock many people feel when they first become conscious of their ageing parents' impending mortality and their fallibility.

Of particular understated power are Emily's attempts to find love. At one point she says she doesn't know what love is, but, like most people, she keeps looking. Any person's serial relationships would appear depressing when viewed in retrospect; the hopes with which one embarks on each relationship being dashed by either one's own disillusionment or the other person's.

Perhaps the book's blackness is in part due to Yates's refusal to give in to sentimentality - he doesn't describe the little joys that characterise the good parts in a relationship or life, so that the reader is left with a skeletal sketch of the failures of each. But peering through the dark, I did catch glimpses of hope. For all Tony's grim, bigoted, veiled thuggishness and the joylessness of two of his sons, his and Sarah's middle son Peter is a ray of light, a kind, sensitive person who responds to Emily's reaching out. Even at the end, after Emily's bitter outburst, he is willing to welcome her into his home - the book's first suggestion of unconditional affection for a long time.

Powerful and understated, this is a novel that will make you think for long after you've finished.

She was always misunderstood, 08 Aug 2004
"Easter Parade" follows American 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.

Get Down, 03 Feb 2003
It's slightly cheeky of Richard Yates's publishers to put out The Easter Parade like a new book, in large format. He's been dead ten years of course, and just didn't have that Calvino-Cookson foresight to plug his drawers with half-baked doodlings on which his family could keep themselves in the manner etc. etc. after his death - what an idiot! - so The Easter Parade is actually an old novel, first published in 1976 and reissued now to cash in on the sleeper success of, well, his last reissue, Revolutionary Road.

Yates is no sentimentalist, and anyone who liked Revolutionary Road will not be expecting a laugh riot, but even so The Easter Parade is remarkably cruel and bleak. He puts his cards on the table in the opening sentence: "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life..." and the following 220 pages pore over their unhappiness in forensic detail. If this was on TV it would be called When Lives Collapse! or possibly just Endurance.

The sisters are Sarah and Emily Grimes (note Dickensian naming: grim, grime). Their parents divorce and they live with their mother, who likes them to call her Pookie. Their father has a great job in a great newspaper - or so they think, until he tells them how he's really nothing more than a low-status hack. And then dies. Sarah gets married to a grunt called Tony and quickly gets a few kids under her belt. Emily meanwhile, who is really the centre of the book, goes through a string of unsuitable relationships, all of which end badly when he leaves her (because he's impotent) or she leaves him (because he's a bore) or he leaves her (because he's bisexual and wants to explore other avenues, so to speak) or she leaves him, and so on... Meanwhile Tony is beating Sarah about, and the one time that she rings Emily wanting to leave him and move in with her, Emily puts her off because for once she's in a good relationship and doesn't want her sister cramping her brief happiness. Which doesn't last anyway, of course.

Ultimately hardly anyone gets out of the book alive, and I'm not sure if there is a tiny chink of light at the end or if I just imagined it, desperate for relief. I kept reading partly because it's brilliantly written and partly out of morbid curiosity to see what Yates would do to his little laboratory mice next. And it's not only the things that happen to the characters that is cruel, but also Yates's obvious contempt for them.

So it's hard to know what the message is in The Easter Parade (perhaps Yates would have balked at the suggestion, as Douglas Adams did: "No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book"): that life is hard and then you die? That whatever you throw at them, people will keep coming back for more? That, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, the majority of lives simply aren't worth living? The only thing it told me for sure is that yes, there is a book out there that makes Revolutionary Road look like Hi-de-Hi. (You know: the bit in chapter 4 where Frank Wheeler won the knobbly knees contest.)

Eleven out of Ten, 14 Mar 2006
The first of many things to love about this book is the bold-as-you-like title. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness? Man goes into publisher's office:

Man: I've got this book of stories I want you to publish.

Publisher: Oh yeah? Let me see that.

Man: Try this one.

Publisher: [reading] Well, this is gloomy as hell, buddy, but there's something there. Maybe we can get them in with a cheery title, they won't know what hit 'em.

Man: I have a title.

Publisher: How many stories have you got for the book?

Man: Eleven.

Publisher: And what's your title?

Man: ...Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

Publisher: Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, buddy.

And yet - it worked. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published, and acclaimed, shortly after Revolutionary Road. Didn't sell, of course, but what do you expect? It is gloomy as hell - but there's most certainly something there. More than something: misery, humiliation, pity, desperation, weakness, ignorance, bullying - oh and loneliness. But despite all this, the stories are bright-eyed and pink-tongued. They shine or bristle with life, even if it's not the sort of life you would conceivably care to share in. This is the sort of thing you get, from the second story, The Best of Everything, about a couple who are about to get married without either really wanting to:

"She'd have time for a long talk with her mother that night, and the next morning, "bright and early" (her eyes stung at the thought of her mother's plain, happy face), they would start getting dressed for the wedding. Then the church and the ceremony, and then the reception (Would her father get drunk? Would Muriel Ketchel sulk about not being a bridesmaid?), and finally the train to Atlantic City, and the hotel. But from the hotel on she couldn't plan any more. A door would lock behind her and there would be a wild, fantastic silence, and nobody in all the world but Ralph to lead the way."

The pleasure in Yates's stories is not some sort of misanthopric delight in seeing the downtrodden trodden yet further down. His characters are unfortunate yet resilient (admittedly because sometimes they're unaware how unfortunate they are); they bear their fate with stoicism, and there are no culpably dramatic Perfect-Day-for-Bananafish endings. Even, in a rare moment of generosity, there is compassionate relief for a character at the end of his story (A Glutton for Punishment), albeit only in the sense that he gets to share his burden with his wife, rather than concealing it as he had intended to.

Whatever the pleasure, it's undeniable and unopposable, because the stories kept me reopening them - just one more - like some sort of anti-candy, as unsweet as can be but nonetheless addictive.

The Best School of Writing, 14 Aug 2007
The most autobiographical novel of an author who specialises in such an approach to fiction, A Good School is not the best book by Yates but is still better than most. For those of you not yet familiar with this superb writer, can I urge you to lose no more time in discovering him? Actually this is no mean place to start an exploration of his oeuvre for although published in 1978, it takes as its inspiration Yates's own school days in the early to mid forties and much can be learnt of the author and his later preoccupations from this fictionalised account. In elegant and effortless prose Yates quickly paints a world and a cast of characters which you very rapidly find yourself caring about, the human perception and emotional honesty which typifies all his writing is here in spades. The best trick of the book is the skill with which Yates manages to evoke that dualistic approach many of us adopt in looking back on our schooldays-which as here can often be riven with feelings of inadequacy, bullying, struggles for status and personal tragedy-yet somehow still coating them with the haze of nostalgia for a lost idealism and the energy of youth. In Yates's unsentimental hands teachers and boys live and hurt, learning that the certainties of youth are anything but: school offering a glimpse of a troubled future. Recommended to all and as a stepping stone to the great Revolutionary Road and Young Hearts Crying

A Strangely Haunting Little Book, 24 May 2007
A Good School follows the lives of various characters from a group of (mostly) WASP school boys at a New England prep school in the years leading up to, and directly following Pearl Harbour. It covers similar themes to other prep school stories such as Catcher In The Rye and has a strong sense of pathos running through much of the book. A Good School is under 170 pages long so it's not an epic multi-layered story, it is however a beautifully crafted book, the prose is very tight and there's not a word out of place.

A Special Author, 01 Jul 2007

A Special Providence starts with a short visit in 1944 from eighteen year-old Private Robert Prentice to his mother in New York. Robert has a pass from the infantry and his mixed feelings about his mother are apparent from the start: while he feels duty-bound to spend his time off seeing her, his irritation with her is profound: 'Her voice by now had become a rich and tireless monologue'... 'It went on and on while he...made whatever answers she seemed to want, or to need. After a while he stopped listening. His ears took in only the rise and fall of her voice, the elaborate, familiar, endless rhythm of it; but from long experience he was able to say ''Oh yes'', or 'Of course'', in all the right places'.

From here, we follow Robert back to the infantry and his propulsion into the action of the second world war in Europe. Intermittently, we return to his mother, Alice, and find out more about her and what events in her life have shaped her.

Yates's spare, deadpan prose suits the pursuit of war. The cruel fact that Robert's coltish enthusiasm is not enough to win him popularity and heroism in battle is portrayed unflinchingly. The horrors of war have been covered vividly by other authors but Yates's day-by-day account of what war entails drives the unglamorous, gritty reality home. For once, Yates's trademark blackness does not seem out of place or excessive. On the contrary, the skillful sketches of Prentice's colleagues bring an element of humanity to a sordid and inhumane topic: as well as the expected bullies and power-freaks there are complex characters such as John Quint, the articulate intellectual who Prentice idolises, and Lieutenant Covely, whose down-to-earth comraderie and desire to be liked barely mask a fear others of his rank rarely display publically.

Alice Prentice's story is complex and intriguing. At the beginning, when her son is practically gritting his teeth to stop himself from snapping at her, she seems almost comical; a theatrical woman with delusions of grandeur able to persuade herself that her big break as a sculptor is just around the next corner. Yates's description of her embarrassingly histrionic outbursts of breast-clutching, effusive crying and falling to the ground kicking her feet is gleefully, wickedly entertaining. But as Yates reveals more of her past, her selfishness is tinged with a poignancy - she, like many of Yates's female characters, has been unlucky in love, betrayed, disappointed. By the time the reader reaches the end and reads of Alice being driven by desperate loneliness into a superficial friendship with a woman she really doesn't like, we feel a mixture of sympathy, pity and a tiny bit of contempt for this woman whose fantasies of stardom and allusions to a life she can't afford have led her to take so selfishly from those around her. The scene where Alice and the friend, Natalie, eat in the same restaurant that Alice visited with Robert at the start of the book is a masterpiece in understated brilliance, the disingenuousness and utter selfishness of both women being conveyed brilliantly in the matter-of-fact use of terms which would be hilariously out of place in any genuine friendship: 'She hoped this would lead to other anecdotes... because she knew she would soon be able to stop being able to listen. That often happened; Natalie would go on talking, elaborating on the injustice of her position, and after a while Alice would lose all sense of what she was saying. She would sit watching Natalie's talking mouth and shrugging shoulders and gesturing hands with her mind far away on other things, waiting only for the silence that would mean it was her turn to talk'.
And: 'But Alice could tell that Natalie wanted her own turn to talk now and she gracefully yielded the floor'...
And: 'Natalie's face, withdrawing now in the harsh light... was suddenly a mask of insincerity. How ugly and old she is, Alice thought...She wanted to say, Natalie, I don't realy like you at all, and I never had'.

It is this dry, acutely sharp perceptiveness that Yates displays, able to capture a pathological relationship or complicated emotion in a few devastating sentences, that makes this book so potent. The lives he describes may be yawningly ordinary and grey, but the plain, uncluttered way he describes them is startlingly, deliciously colourful.

A worthwhile book, 30 Jun 2005
I bought this book after reading Revolutionary Road, and without knowing anything about the story. Initially, I was disappointed that the main part of the book is about an 18yr old boy becoming a soldier in 1944. However, I persisted reading it, and then found that I didn't want to put the book down. The rest of the book is an account of the boy's mother, and their life together after she divorced his father. She was a woman whose ambition was to become a successful sculptor, but ended-up clocking in and out of a lense-grinding workshop and losing her son as a result of the war, even though he actually came out of it alive. Generally, I felt sorry for both mother and son, but there were times when I wanted to be able to shake the mother's shoulders, and at the end I wanted to punch the son! My father, who was also an 18yr old soldier in 1944, read this book, and he said that it was the most realistic account of what it was like to be a young conscripted soldier that he had ever read or seen in films. As Richard Yates was 18 in 1944, and served in the US army, it seems likely that at least this part of the book is autobiographical. It is very different from Revolutionary Road, but it has a very worthwhile story to tell.

Exquisite, 09 Oct 2008
There are few writers that can match Yates and this story, of the few I've read (I've resisted the desperate urge to devour them all too quickly) excels beyond so many other writer's work. The comparison drawn with Fitzgerald is right but I would say that Yates is better, more consistent. If you find Fitzgerald frustrating, Yates will show you why better than anyone; if you love Fitzgerald, you will worship this! If you like your books beautifully moving, exquisitely sad and sensual with sharp, dark humour that bites, then it doesn't get better than this. Yates' writing never puts a foot a wrong and from the outset you know you are in safe hands. It's one that shifts your perspective on life and left me fizzing for months, thankful that I found it and disappointed that I can't discover it again.

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road, 30 Aug 2008
Revolutionary Road deserves all the praise and adulation it's had over the years. Rarely are two protagonists so heartbreakingly real, rarely are they so convincing as living, breathing human beings stuck in the monotonous machine of life, yearning to escape, to break free. Yates advances their arc, their developments and realisations and dreams, brilliantly, and conveys relationship breakdown as realistically as Ian McEwan. This is a great indictment of the American way of life, where individuality and humanity is so easily stifled, and also a strange defense of it. There are times when Frank is happy, and it is only when they strive to break free that things gang agly. And the only person who empathises with the Wheelers is mad.

A great book, full of the kind of brilliant writing that makes you startled to realise you're actually reading. Very sad, but full of warm compassion. There's no way you'll regret reading it.

A great novel, 14 Aug 2008
I don't want to repeat what most of the other reviewers have written. They are correct - it is a very good novel. The film will help sales. It pre-dates the later Rabbit books by Updike which cover, in some ways, similar ground but I wish I had read this earlier and before Updike (and I did Amer. Lit. at university - no one mentioned Yates!). I was too young in 1961 to read this but those that did then must have realised what a remarkable book it is; maybe today we are used to this kind of theme/writing but then? The question is: would you recommend this book to a young person starting out on life (it might be a real life turn-off for them!)or a person near retirement who might shrug and say: "Yeah, we all had dreams but some times they don't always work out"?

Understand the modern world, 06 Aug 2008
If you want to get an insight into the break down of family life and the obsession with celebrity and appearance in the post modern world then look no further. The need to be different in the ridiculous stylised modern world of work is covered with great insight. Love and the lust underneath it for what we don't have are there too. Everyone might be flawed in some way but don't worry about that as it's a great read from start to finish.

Well Travelled Road, 20 Jul 2008
Richard Yates's novel "Revolutionary Road" has developed a cult following in recent years, and a forthcoming film adaptation will no doubt only add further to the interest in what has been widely dubbed a "neglected masterpiece".

"Revolutionary Road" tells the story of an attractive young couple, April and Frank Wheeler, who live in a desirable suburb with their two children. Frank commutes into the city where he works for Knox Business Machines, while April is a housewife and mother. The novel, written in the early sixties, is set in the mid-fifties, and outwardly the Wheelers are the epitome of a wholesome American couple.

But the novel opens with a disastrous amateur theatrical performance in which April plays the lead. She has nurtured dreams of being an actress, and the shattering of these dreams sets in motion a series of events that lead to the tragic unravelling of the Wheeler marriage.

For its time, Richard Yates's novel was ground-breaking, but I can only review it as a modern reader in the present day. The idea that beneath the suburban ideal lurks a tangled web of discontent is the clearly declared theme early in the novel, and thereafter the plot develops along familiar lines. One can credit Yates with being ahead of his time, but whether that makes the reading experience more enjoyable or compelling is a matter of opinion. The recent TV series "Mad Men", for example, dealt with the same theme in a more surprising and oblique fashion.

Overall, this is an important novel, which deserves its long-awaited recognition, but I'm reluctant to recommend it as a worthwhile reading experience over more contemporary work that addresses the same issues.

A spare yet wrenching tale, 29 Feb 2008
Here we have a less known great author whose every word, every sentence, is packed with meaning and art. Mr. Yates must be the Flaubert of 20th Century writers in his near perfectly written and readable books. This one has just about everything. The two sisters of the divorced parents grow up under a cloud of parental dissolution, but by late adolescence seem on their way to happiness and security. The older marries of the British "Boy Next Door" (Actually upstairs), the younger is awarded a full scholarship to Barnard, no mean feat. With excursions throughout the NYC area, including a visit to the father's newspaper building, the village,etc. we slowly see how these lives deteriorate into a bad marriage, and too many sad relationships. Maybe a bit gloomy, but not without its humour, including a very odd women's group, this is a very breezy and easy read, with more insights than you can usually find in a much longer family saga.

the easter parade, 29 Jun 2007
The Easter Parade can be seen as a bleak novel in that great swathes of sadness, loneliness and ugliness permeate through the protagonists' lives. Much of this is due to Yates's simple, matter-of-fact style. He relates the story in a no-frills way, so that the utter pointlessness of life pokes through like a bony white toe through a threadbare sock. He rarely dwells on events and in many ways skims over the joys - motherhood, aunthood, love, friendship - that punctuate life. Seen from this vantage point, any life might appear bleak: the bitter-sweetness of childhood, the disappointment of finding that noone is perfect, the vileness of physically and emotionally cruel people, serial monogamy which, if a person ends up single, can be seen pessimistically as a series of failures, the ant-like way we live, scurry around and then die. That Yates manages to make the novel not only readable but also mesmerising is testament to his powers as a story teller. In Yates's hands, less does mean more, his pared-down style and conscious absence of literary gymnastics resulting in story-telling that is simultaneously easy to digest and hugely satisfying.

The story follows the lives of two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, daughters of divorced parents, born in 1921 and 1925 respectively. Growing up with their flighty mother with occasional visits to their idealised father, they are very different. Sarah embraces conventionality and settles down early for what she hopes is an idyllic life with English public school-educated Tony who, to her infatuated eyes, looks like a young Laurence Olivier. Emily is spikier and more independant; she samples sex before marriage and decides she rather likes it, so she follows a more (for the time) daring route in life, working and having serial relationships with men. But long-term happiness is elusive for both sisters. Throughout their lives, they keep in touch, and their sisterly relationship is as complex as sibling relationships can be, their undoubted mutual love coloured with swirls of jealousy (Emily milks her sister for stories of Sarah's relationship with her father but simmers with envy and rage at their exclusive affection) and intolerance (Emily knows she should offer her sister sanctuary from her SPOILER: violent marriage , but when it comes to the crunch, she doesn't want her current relationship threatened by Sarah's presence.


The simplicity of Yates's style is in many ways deceptive - huge themes are tackled, but with a touch so light that the ensuing thought-process is largely the reader's. This works well - rather than being force-fed processed emotions like a foie gras goose with purreed nutrients , the reader bites the crisp, uncluttered text and thinks for themselves. When Yates writes of Emily meeting her father for lunch 'she thought he looked surprisingly old as he came down the steps, wearing a raincoat that wasn't quite clean', he encapsulates succinctly the shock many people feel when they first become conscious of their ageing parents' impending mortality and their fallibility.

Of particular understated power are Emily's attempts to find love. At one point she says she doesn't know what love is, but, like most people, she keeps looking. Any person's serial relationships would appear depressing when viewed in retrospect; the hopes with which one embarks on each relationship being dashed by either one's own disillusionment or the other person's.

Perhaps the book's blackness is in part due to Yates's refusal to give in to sentimentality - he doesn't describe the little joys that characterise the good parts in a relationship or life, so that the reader is left with a skeletal sketch of the failures of each. But peering through the dark, I did catch glimpses of hope. For all Tony's grim, bigoted, veiled thuggishness and the joylessness of two of his sons, his and Sarah's middle son Peter is a ray of light, a kind, sensitive person who responds to Emily's reaching out. Even at the end, after Emily's bitter outburst, he is willing to welcome her into his home - the book's first suggestion of unconditional affection for a long time.

Powerful and understated, this is a novel that will make you think for long after you've finished.

She was always misunderstood, 08 Aug 2004
"Easter Parade" follows American 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.

Get Down, 03 Feb 2003
It's slightly cheeky of Richard Yates's publishers to put out The Easter Parade like a new book, in large format. He's been dead ten years of course, and just didn't have that Calvino-Cookson foresight to plug his drawers with half-baked doodlings on which his family could keep themselves in the manner etc. etc. after his death - what an idiot! - so The Easter Parade is actually an old novel, first published in 1976 and reissued now to cash in on the sleeper success of, well, his last reissue, Revolutionary Road.

Yates is no sentimentalist, and anyone who liked Revolutionary Road will not be expecting a laugh riot, but even so The Easter Parade is remarkably cruel and bleak. He puts his cards on the table in the opening sentence: "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life..." and the following 220 pages pore over their unhappiness in forensic detail. If this was on TV it would be called When Lives Collapse! or possibly just Endurance.

The sisters are Sarah and Emily Grimes (note Dickensian naming: grim, grime). Their parents divorce and they live with their mother, who likes them to call her Pookie. Their father has a great job in a great newspaper - or so they think, until he tells them how he's really nothing more than a low-status hack. And then dies. Sarah gets married to a grunt called Tony and quickly gets a few kids under her belt. Emily meanwhile, who is really the centre of the book, goes through a string of unsuitable relationships, all of which end badly when he leaves her (because he's impotent) or she leaves him (because he's a bore) or he leaves her (because he's bisexual and wants to explore other avenues, so to speak) or she leaves him, and so on... Meanwhile Tony is beating Sarah about, and the one time that she rings Emily wanting to leave him and move in with her, Emily puts her off because for once she's in a good relationship and doesn't want her sister cramping her brief happiness. Which doesn't last anyway, of course.

Ultimately hardly anyone gets out of the book alive, and I'm not sure if there is a tiny chink of light at the end or if I just imagined it, desperate for relief. I kept reading partly because it's brilliantly written and partly out of morbid curiosity to see what Yates would do to his little laboratory mice next. And it's not only the things that happen to the characters that is cruel, but also Yates's obvious contempt for them.

So it's hard to know what the message is in The Easter Parade (perhaps Yates would have balked at the suggestion, as Douglas Adams did: "No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book"): that life is hard and then you die? That whatever you throw at them, people will keep coming back for more? That, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, the majority of lives simply aren't worth living? The only thing it told me for sure is that yes, there is a book out there that makes Revolutionary Road look like Hi-de-Hi. (You know: the bit in chapter 4 where Frank Wheeler won the knobbly knees contest.)

Eleven out of Ten, 14 Mar 2006
The first of many things to love about this book is the bold-as-you-like title. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness? Man goes into publisher's office:

Man: I've got this book of stories I want you to publish.

Publisher: Oh yeah? Let me see that.

Man: Try this one.

Publisher: [reading] Well, this is gloomy as hell, buddy, but there's something there. Maybe we can get them in with a cheery title, they won't know what hit 'em.

Man: I have a title.

Publisher: How many stories have you got for the book?

Man: Eleven.

Publisher: And what's your title?

Man: ...Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

Publisher: Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, buddy.

And yet - it worked. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published, and acclaimed, shortly after Revolutionary Road. Didn't sell, of course, but what do you expect? It is gloomy as hell - but there's most certainly something there. More than something: misery, humiliation, pity, desperation, weakness, ignorance, bullying - oh and loneliness. But despite all this, the stories are bright-eyed and pink-tongued. They shine or bristle with life, even if it's not the sort of life you would conceivably care to share in. This is the sort of thing you get, from the second story, The Best of Everything, about a couple who are about to get married without either really wanting to:

"She'd have time for a long talk with her mother that night, and the next morning, "bright and early" (her eyes stung at the thought of her mother's plain, happy face), they would start getting dressed for the wedding. Then the church and the ceremony, and then the reception (Would her father get drunk? Would Muriel Ketchel sulk about not being a bridesmaid?), and finally the train to Atlantic City, and the hotel. But from the hotel on she couldn't plan any more. A door would lock behind her and there would be a wild, fantastic silence,