"The Easter Parade"

In 1999, Stewart O’Nan (author of “Emily, Alone,” which I posted about yesterday) wrote of his great admiration for the late author Richard Yates, and of his concern that Yates’ books were less and less read. I share O’Nan’s concern, and I hope that the 2008 movie version of Yates’ great novel, “Revolutionary Road,” has drawn some readers to further explore his novels. I have just listened to the CD version of another of his novels, “The Easter Parade” (originally published 1976; audio version BBC Audiobooks America, 2009), and found it a very sad but powerful and insightful story. It tells of two sisters, Sarah and Emily, over much of their lifetimes; we learn of the story from Emily’s perspective. The girls’ father is a sad character who loves the girls but is destroyed by alcohol and depression and dies young; their mother lives much longer but the girls soon have to take care of her as much as she does them, and she too is felled by alcoholism. The family curse continues in both the daughters. Sarah marries and has children; she stays with her husband even though he abuses her, and takes refuge in drinking. Emily is the “free spirit,” loving and living with a series of men but never “settling down”; she too drinks too much. She is independent, always working, but a combination of alcohol, being left by a lover, and losing a job leave her in a vulnerable and sad position in her late middle age. The story is often grim, yet somehow there are sporadic times of optimism and even happiness throughout as well. Although the two women have less than optimal lives, Sarah has her family, and Emily has her independence and her lovers, and although they are very different in some ways, and don’t see each other often as adults, they have each other as well. The two women have a family bond that lasts, that forms a lifelong underpinning to their lives. Yates has much to show us about the difficulties of life, about the reasons people turn to drink, and about the destruction caused by alcohol. But he also seems to be telling us that no matter how difficult life gets, the thing that can -- if we are lucky -- buoy us up and connect us to the world is family.