Evan is a strapping but slightly dull young man; he lacks confidence, discipline, and ambition. At 24, he already has a failed marriage behind him. His father, Charles, a retired army officer, feels unfulfilled, having missed his chance to shine in the fighting of World War I and married to a long-suffering, self-isolating alcoholic.
Evan remarries, this time to Rachel, a nice young woman who lives with her mother, Gloria, a nervous divorcee and compulsive talker, and Phil, Rachel's cynical 15-year-old brother. Cold Spring Harbor, the final novel by the stellar American author Richard Yates, handles the tepid, incongruous relationships between the two small families and the constellation of characters that orbit them.
Yates' characters grow quietly desperate as they stumble down any path that might lead them to what's missing. They are stung by resentment and disappointment, seemingly doomed to forever reckon with the disconnect between reality and the life they had imagined. Sexist and patriarchal norms blossom in the foreground of this novel, which was published in 1986.
Here are two of my favorite passages. First, after the Army rejects him because of his perforated eardrums, Evan begins to worry about his social standing as America prepares to enter World War II:
Well, but still, other men were saying goodbye to their wives all over the world. Other men were caught up in a profoundly hazardous adventure now, unable to guess how long it might last and not even caring. None of them were ready to die but they all knew their death was entirely possible; that was what would invigorate every waking moment of their lives.
And when they came back, these other men—or when most of them did they would all have a decided advantage over Evan Shephard. They might look at him as if he were scarcely worth bothering with, the way the cops had looked at him the night he was booked for disorderly conduct. If they talked to him at all it would be in tones of condescension, rarely waiting to hear his replies. And whatever elaborate peaceful structures they might manage to build in the world, after the war, would always seem to be there for no other purpose than to shut him out.
One thing, therefore, was clear; they had better not find him like this. Evan Shephard was damned if they'd find him punching a factory time clock, fondling his thermos bottle of coffee and his little brown paper bag of lunch, doing mindless, underling things all day then driving home in an absurdly cheap old car to this absurdly expensive place.
And, later in the novel, Evan and his brother-in-law, Phil, set out on a driving lesson. It is a chance to bond; Evan has always loved driving, and Phil is a lonely teenager eager to mature. But the lesson fizzles out in frustration.
That was how the lesson went until darkness began to fall—nothing
really taught, nothing really learned—and when Evan drove them silently
home he appeared to be sulking, as though he'd been offended by the
afternoon. It was clear now that there would be no further driving
lessons unless Rachel could find some agreeable way of encouraging them;
it seemed too, from the set of Evan's handsome profile, that he might
now be thinking of ways to let her know, tonight, what a hopeless
fucking idiot her brother was.
And Phil knew there might not be
much profit or future in hating your brother-in-law, but that didn't
mean you couldn't figure him out and see him plain. This dumb bastard
would never get into college. This ignorant, inarticulate, car-driving
son of a bitch would never even be promoted to a halfway decent job. This
asshole was going to spend the rest of his life on the factory floor
with all the other slobs, and it would serve him right. Fuck him.
Phil also imagined how his approaching chance to enter the service and the war would give him the advantage over blue-collar Evan.
Phil Drake might not be much bigger or heavier at eighteen, but he'd be stronger and smarter and hardly ever silly any more. Except for a few widely scattered Irving School boys there would be nobody to remember what a jerk he'd been, and so the army might be the making of him; it might be the time of his life. Just before going overseas he would come home on furlough, wearing a uniform that could only make Evan Shepard weak with envy, and he'd say "Well, how're things going at the plant, Evan?"
Or, to be fair, Evan might have found his way into some second-rate engineering school by then, years older than any of his classmates, with Rachel at some menial daily work to make ends meet. But even a line like "How's college, Evan?" would be good enough, coming from a soldier in wartime. It would take care of the situation; it would do the job.
I first read this book in May 2021 and then reread it in May 2022. It was even better the second time.
