The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

Yates throws a despairing shrug at Tolstoy when he opens The Easter Parade with

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parent’s divorce.

The old priest’s advice to the young curate about sermons was:
- Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you have just told them.
In the end like one scrying the lees in the glass of life, the surviving sister says:

’Yes, I’m tired,’ she said. ‘And do you know a funny thing? I’m almost 50 years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.’

Telling us:
The mother is ‘Pookie’. Yes, the girls Sarah and Emily are encouraged to call her that. Yates avoids the words peripatetic and peregrination in relation to the movement of Pookie about the various towns where she works in a modest capacity,certainly not as a Realtor which was plan A. The words alluded to and in general all linguistic flourishes are avoided in a controlled prose. Here’s the funeral of the father who departs early in the book:

There wasn’t much of a ceremony at the chapel. An electric organ played, a tired-looking man read a few nondenominational prayers, the casket was removed, and it was over.

Pookie is slapdash and approximate and her decline into alcoholism is mapped with precision by Yates who knew that region well. Emily the youngest daughter at Barnard College has come home for the weekend and they both are going to visit Sarah and Tony and their 3 children where they live on Long Island in a clapboard bungalow on the grounds of Tony’s fathers residence. In a nice touch we get a certain amount of real estate information.

Yates creates islands of omission. Though the word ‘snob’ is never used, Pookie is one, and her nerves dealing with Wilson in the big house lead her to babble and get drunk. Emily stays on the sherry which in that family amounts to a temperance drink.

By the time she was ready to leave at last Geoffrey Wilson had to help her to the door. It was getting dark. Emily took her arm - it felt soft and weak - and they made their way past trees and overgrown shrubbery towards the long road to the railroad station.

Actually the whole family have a problem with alcohol, even the father, though that information comes from mother and you know how alcoholics worry about other peoples drinking. Over the years the damage accumulates and the grip on things slackens. Clever Emily drifts from relationship to relationship with neurotic men. She has no luck or perhaps it is that the recapitulation of the primal family drama leads her towards older divorced men that trail issues.

I read it through at one sitting. It’s a short book, 225 pages in the Vintage Classics paperback. Now reading it again I find the low key tone just right for everyday tragedy. Excellent.

Revolutionary Road: The Movie

Should this have been done? Probably not. It wasn't genreiste enough if you'll pardon the barbaric coinage. Certain indifferent novels can be made into films that piggyback on the signs and signals that are well established. We know how to read them and their blandness is an appropriate lack of a barrier to the interpretive glossary. A good novel is its own world with its own climate and the translation to another medium leaches out the texture. They replaced the Freudian psychology of the book with visual signals. The Campbells house is furnished in shades of brown, not even good Grand Rapids whilst the Wheelers are into pale Dano-Scando. It's probably marks the difference between a comfortable sofa and a statement about your taste.

It may well come to pass and perhaps it already has, that Freudian Depth Psychology will be studied as a branch of literature or a vade mecum for 20th.Century studies. It's a verbalising technique; consider the key practice of free association. We lie down, we become embalmed in archetypal stillness which is essentially Cartesian and therefore at odds with the dissolution into imagery of film. The motivation in the book is soluble in this medium.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Going by the author information in the front of the book there is some congruence between the life of the author Richard Yates and the protagonist of Revolutionary Road. They are of a similar age, war experience, job experience. Whether the picture window was part of the vista I don’t know but in the large corporation , Remington Rand, where he worked, there would be plenty of suburbia to go around.

The focus of the book is on the Wheeler family, Frank & April parents, Jennifer and Michael the children up in Connecticut. That perennial American stranger, the absent father, is in both the Wheelers lives. The novel opens with an amateur drama production of Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest. Being a Googleamus I find that it is a sort of key or ‘clef’ if you will. (from the play)

Gabby (undeterred): We could go to France, and you’d show me everything, all the cathedrals and the art—and explain everything. And you wouldn’t have to marry me, Alan. We’d just live in sin and have one hell of a time.

Squier: That’s a startling proposal, Gabrielle. I hadn’t expected to receive anything like it in this desert….

Gabby: Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?

Also foundmarin

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, April.

Both the Wheelers are in the Holdenesque argot of the era (1955) phonies, actors in search of a character or something. The little grace notes of observation honed by empirical acquaintance are delicate. Frank Wheeler drinks dry sherry on a Sunday. It is I suppose almost Calvinist after the hard liquor of the week and slightly brittle and sophisticated. Not that they are narcissistic, Narcissus had an image that he loved, they are looking for one that someone else can love.

I won’t say anything about the plot. Period note: She decamps to the couch. Let’s not be too snotty about Suburbia, how do you think you got to College, punk. This is a very fine novel by someone I had never heard of. It is one I will reread.