The Easter Parade [Paperback]

"Easter Parade" follows American sisters, Emily and Sarah Grimes, over forty years. They enter adulthood during WWII, and their lives follow tremendously different trajectories. Sarah is the traditional one: she marries early, has three children, and settles into a seemingly idyllic life in the countryside. Emily is more independent, and she experiences a series of unsatisfying intimate relationships and drifts through life. The novel chiefly concerns the relationship, or lack thereof, between the sisters and their family. The story climaxes in the 1960's with mild invocations of the women's liberation movement, and Yates draws clear parallels between the sisters and their times. Although the time period is specific, the characters remain amazingly relatable and universal.

The most exceptional aspect of Yates's writing is the effortlessness with which he encapsulates life: "The Easter Parade" is a relatively short novel - yet it's remarkably complete due to Yates's talent in creating scenes that so clearly recapitulate a particular period in the sisters' lives. Yates is best-known for his brilliant debut, "Revolutionary Road." His subsequent novels have received considerably less acclaim - an untenable situation considering the quality and exquisiteness of his writing. With "The Easter Parade" the story is simple but heart-breaking; the characters are unforgettable; the final epiphany is indisputable. Most highly recommended.

The Easter Parade can be seen as a bleak novel in that great swathes of sadness, loneliness and ugliness permeate through the protagonists' lives. Much of this is due to Yates's simple, matter-of-fact style. He relates the story in a no-frills way, so that the utter pointlessness of life pokes through like a bony white toe through a threadbare sock. He rarely dwells on events and in many ways skims over the joys - motherhood, aunthood, love, friendship - that punctuate life. Seen from this vantage point, any life might appear bleak: the bitter-sweetness of childhood, the disappointment of finding that noone is perfect, the vileness of physically and emotionally cruel people, serial monogamy which, if a person ends up single, can be seen pessimistically as a series of failures, the ant-like way we live, scurry around and then die. That Yates manages to make the novel not only readable but also mesmerising is testament to his powers as a story teller. In Yates's hands, less does mean more, his pared-down style and conscious absence of literary gymnastics resulting in story-telling that is simultaneously easy to digest and hugely satisfying.

The story follows the lives of two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, daughters of divorced parents, born in 1921 and 1925 respectively. Growing up with their flighty mother with occasional visits to their idealised father, they are very different. Sarah embraces conventionality and settles down early for what she hopes is an idyllic life with English public school-educated Tony who, to her infatuated eyes, looks like a young Laurence Olivier. Emily is spikier and more independant; she samples sex before marriage and decides she rather likes it, so she follows a more (for the time) daring route in life, working and having serial relationships with men. But long-term happiness is elusive for both sisters. Throughout their lives, they keep in touch, and their sisterly relationship is as complex as sibling relationships can be, their undoubted mutual love coloured with swirls of jealousy (Emily milks her sister for stories of Sarah's relationship with her father but simmers with envy and rage at their exclusive affection) and intolerance (Emily knows she should offer her sister sanctuary from her SPOILER: violent marriage , but when it comes to the crunch, she doesn't want her current relationship threatened by Sarah's presence.

The simplicity of Yates's style is in many ways deceptive - huge themes are tackled, but with a touch so light that the ensuing thought-process is largely the reader's. This works well - rather than being force-fed processed emotions like a foie gras goose with purreed nutrients , the reader bites the crisp, uncluttered text and thinks for themselves. When Yates writes of Emily meeting her father for lunch 'she thought he looked surprisingly old as he came down the steps, wearing a raincoat that wasn't quite clean', he encapsulates succinctly the shock many people feel when they first become conscious of their ageing parents' impending mortality and their fallibility.

Of particular understated power are Emily's attempts to find love. At one point she says she doesn't know what love is, but, like most people, she keeps looking. Any person's serial relationships would appear depressing when viewed in retrospect; the hopes with which one embarks on each relationship being dashed by either one's own disillusionment or the other person's.

Perhaps the book's blackness is in part due to Yates's refusal to give in to sentimentality - he doesn't describe the little joys that characterise the good parts in a relationship or life, so that the reader is left with a skeletal sketch of the failures of each. But peering through the dark, I did catch glimpses of hope. For all Tony's grim, bigoted, veiled thuggishness and the joylessness of two of his sons, his and Sarah's middle son Peter is a ray of light, a kind, sensitive person who responds to Emily's reaching out. Even at the end, after Emily's bitter outburst, he is willing to welcome her into his home - the book's first suggestion of unconditional affection for a long time.

Powerful and understated, this is a novel that will make you think for long after you've finished.

Inspired by the brilliant Revolutionary Road, I looked forward to this book. Compared to that classic, it falls short; viewed on its own merits, it's a good but untidy and uneven book. The sense of period, and the sharp attention to detail are both reminiscent of Yates' other work. His dialogue works well, and the gaps and silences in dialogue also work. Yates understands the reluctance characters might feel to confront, to push, to ask the awkward but necessary question. The relationships he draws feel vivid and lifelike.

The reasons this falls short of Revolutionary Road are twofold. Firstly, the main character (Emily) never quite gets an effective foil. She herself is a strong and colourful character, but she is allowed to drift because she never meets a worthy adversary or partner. This drift is accentuated by the lack of a strong trajectory to the plot - it moves along, but lacks the clarity of purpose that Frank and April Wheeler had - even if this was always downwards.

If you are new to Yates, this gives an idea of how he can draw character and conversation. Revolutionary Road remains, for me, the better book.