A Special Providence (Vintage Classics) [Paperback]

I bought this book after reading Revolutionary Road, and without knowing anything about the story. Initially, 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, and 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, and 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 and out of a lense-grinding workshop and losing her son as a result of the war, even though he actually came out of it alive. Generally, I felt sorry for both mother and son, but there were times when I wanted to be able to shake the mother's shoulders, and at the end I wanted to punch the son! My father, who was also an 18yr old soldier in 1944, read this book, and 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, and 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.

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 and 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 and tireless monologue'... 'It went on and 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 and fall 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 all the right places'.

From here, we follow Robert back to the infantry and his propulsion into the action of the second world war in Europe. Intermittently, we return to his mother, Alice, and find out more about her and 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 and 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 and inhumane topic: as well as the expected bullies and power-freaks there are complex characters such as John Quint, the articulate intellectual who Prentice idolises, and Lieutenant Covely, whose down-to-earth comraderie and desire to be liked barely mask a fear others of his rank rarely display publically.

Alice Prentice's story is complex and intriguing. At the beginning, when her son is practically 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 and falling 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 and reads of Alice being driven by desperate loneliness into a superficial friendship with a woman she really doesn't like, we feel a mixture of sympathy, pity and a tiny bit of contempt for this woman whose fantasies of stardom and allusions to a life she can't afford have led her to take so selfishly from those around her. The scene where Alice and 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 and 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, and after a while Alice would lose all sense of what she was saying. She would sit watching Natalie's talking mouth and shrugging shoulders and 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 and she gracefully yielded the floor'...

And: 'Natalie's face, withdrawing now in the harsh light... was suddenly a mask of insincerity. How ugly and old she is, Alice thought...She wanted to say, Natalie, I don't realy like you at all, and 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 and grey, but the plain, uncluttered way he describes them is startlingly, deliciously colourful.

A well crafted and insightful novel, this is still a real page turner. This is the third of Yates' novel I've read and it won't be the last. He so deserves much wider recognition. I absolutely agree with the previous reviewers. The war scenes are so realistic; Yates uses film images to create a nightmarish world in peace time and war as Prentice is constantly lost and at sea, "...he peered with fascinated distate at the pallid nighttime faces that hung and swayed around him the car..." His relationship with Alice is both claustrophobic and cloying as she tries to, literally, capture him in stone but is also tender and poignant. Yates' characters are so complex: they are ordinary yet his insights raise them above the mundane. We see their weaknesses but also admire their courage. Yates also wonderfully evokes the period and atmosphere that people were living in. The narrative is also so assured and there is a sense of great satisfaction at reaching the end of the book. It doesn't get much better than this.