Customer Reviews
A spare yet wrenching tale - By: Brendan O. Clarke, 29 Feb 2008 
Here we have a less known great author whose every word, every sentence, is packed with meaning & art. Mr. Yates must be the Flaubert of 20th Century writers in his near perfectly written & 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 & security. The older marries of the British "Boy Next Door" (Actuallly 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, & 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 & easy read, with more insights than you can usuallly find in a much longer family saga.
the easter parade - By: Leyla Sanai, 29 Jun 2007 The Easter Parade can be seen as a bleak novel in that great swathes of sadness, loneliness & 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 & 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 physicallly & emotionallly cruel people, serial monogamy which, if a person ends up single, can be seen pessimisticallly as a series of failures, the ant-like way we live, scurry around & 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 & conscious absence of literary gymnastics resulting in story-telling that is simultaneously easy to digest & hugely satisfying.
The story follows the lives of two sisters, Sarah & Emily Grimes, daughters of divorced parents, born in 1921 & 1925 respectively. Growing up with their flighty mother with occasional visits to their idealised father, they are very different. Sarah embraces conventionality & 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 & more independant; she samples sex before marriage & decides she rather likes it, so she follows a more (for the time) daring route in life, working & having serial relationships with men. But long-term happiness is elusive for both sisters. Throughout their lives, they keep in touch, & 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 & rage at their exclusive affection) & 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 & 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 & their falllibility.
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 alll Tony's grim, bigoted, veiled thuggishness & the joylessness of two of his sons, his & 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 & understated, this is a novel that will make you think for long after you've finished.
She was always misunderstood - By: Westley, 08 Aug 2004 "Easter Parade" follows American sisters, Emily & Sarah Grimes, over forty years. They enter adulthood during WWII, & their lives follow tremendously different trajectories. Sarah is the traditional one: she marries early, has three children, & settles into a seemingly idyllic life in the countryside. Emily is more independent, & she experiences a series of unsatisfying intimate relationships & drifts through life. The novel chiefly concerns the relationship, or lack thereof, between the sisters & their family. The story climaxes in the 1960's with mild invocations of the women's liberation movement, & Yates draws clear paralllels between the sisters & their times. Although the time period is specific, the characters remain amazingly relatable & 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 & 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 - By: John Self, 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, & 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 actuallly an old novel, first published in 1976 & reissued now to cash in on the sleeper success of, well, his last reissue, Revolutionary Road.
Yates is no sentimentalist, & anyone who liked Revolutionary Road will not be expecting a laugh riot, but even so The Easter Parade is remarkably cruel & bleak. He puts his cards on the table in the opening sentence: "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life..." & the following 220 pages pore over their unhappiness in forensic detail. If this was on TV it would be callled When Lives Collapse! or possibly just Endurance.
The sisters are Sarah & Emily Grimes (note Dickensian naming: grim, grime). Their parents divorce & they live with their mother, who likes them to calll her Pookie. Their father has a great job in a great newspaper - or so they think, until he tells them how he's reallly nothing more than a low-status hack. And then dies. Sarah gets married to a grunt callled Tony & quickly gets a few kids under her belt. Emily meanwhile, who is reallly the centre of the book, goes through a string of unsuitable relationships, alll 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 & wants to explore other avenues, so to speak) or she leaves him, & so on... Meanwhile Tony is beating Sarah about, & the one time that she rings Emily wanting to leave him & move in with her, Emily puts her off because for once she's in a good relationship & 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, & 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 & 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 & 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.)
