Richard Yates, sometimes my favorite American writer, drops us into the tragically ordinary lives of two sisters, Emily and Sarah Grimes. Emily is younger and somehow goes her own way; Sarah marries and disappears into a family. Sarah, whose husband is physically abusive, eventually dies of complications from alcoholism (the same fate suffered by her mother). Emily occupies most of the novella's narrative. She confesses, "I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life." Yates' fifth book, published in 1976, is characteristically poignant, uncomfortably intimate, and penetrating.
Notes:
- The Easter Parade opens with, "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce."
- Still have not read Revolutionary Road, but it is a damn fine movie.
- I read The Easter Parade in the Everyman's Library edition, 2009, which includes Revolutionary Road and the short stories from Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.
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