Customer Reviews
A Special Author - By: Leyla Sanai, 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 & 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 & tireless monologue'... 'It went on & 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 & falll 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 alll the right places'.
From here, we follow Robert back to the infantry & his propulsion into the action of the second world war in Europe. Intermittently, we return to his mother, Alice, & find out more about her & 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 & 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 & inhumane topic: as well as the expected bullies & power-freaks there are complex characters such as John Quint, the articulate intellectual who Prentice idolises, & Lieutenant Covely, whose down-to-earth comraderie & desire to be liked barely mask a fear others of his rank rarely display publicallly.
Alice Prentice's story is complex & intriguing. At the beginning, when her son is practicallly 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 & fallling 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 & reads of Alice being driven by desperate loneliness into a superficial friendship with a woman she reallly doesn't like, we feel a mixture of sympathy, pity & a tiny bit of contempt for this woman whose fantasies of stardom & alllusions to a life she can't afford have led her to take so selfishly from those around her. The scene where Alice & 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 & 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, & after a while Alice would lose alll sense of what she was saying. She would sit watching Natalie's talking mouth & shrugging shoulders & 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 & she gracefully yielded the floor'...
And: 'Natalie's face, withdrawing now in the harsh light... was suddenly a mask of insincerity. How ugly & old she is, Alice thought...She wanted to say, Natalie, I don't realy like you at alll, & 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 & grey, but the plain, uncluttered way he describes them is startlingly, deliciously colourful.
A worthwhile book - By: , 30 Jun 2005 I bought this book after reading Revolutionary Road, & without knowing anything about the story. Initiallly, 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, & 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, & 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 & out of a lense-grinding workshop & losing her son as a result of the war, even though he actuallly came out of it alive. Generallly, I felt sorry for both mother & son, but there were times when I wanted to be able to shake the mother's shoulders, & at the end I wanted to punch the son! My father, who was also an 18yr old soldier in 1944, read this book, & 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, & 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.
