A Painful Procession
GRAEBER, LAUREL
A Painful Procession The Easter Parade By Richard Yates Delacorte. 229 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Laurel Graeber Richard Yates' latest novel reverses some modern myths about the liberation of women....
...The girls grow up, see a little of the world and question it, but they learn nothing of their origins or destinations...
...Emily remains the primary example of this sad theme...
...Sarah, the beauty, becomes fat and domestic and Emily, the intellectual, wastes away as a dilettante career woman...
...When she berates her sister's husband, she is simply showing off...
...When she evolves into a sad and bewildered Ophelia, strewing acid commentary in place of flowers, there is really nothing and no one to blame...
...Filled with well-articulated passages, the novel's main flaw is that it does not seem to have much purpose—except to say that life hasn't any, either...
...Such unpleasant revelations are the one kind The Easter Parade provides...
...She is seldom insipid, and her very nasti-ness appears to be an instinct for survival...
...Yates makes us remember, too, that Sarah once neglected her aging mother for four days, during which Pookie suffered a stroke...
...Nevertheless, they are almost a relief in a book so full of mysteries —ranging from minor questions concerning a suitor's identity to grisly implications of murder—and whose people are painfully obtuse to boot...
...And her apparent ability to bear troubles is false as well—she actually has a propensity for ignoring them...
...Yates shows her with men who suffer from physical or emotional impotence...
...Yates, however, is an accomplished novelist, capable of arousing feeling where he has injected none...
...Revolutionary Road, his first book, is also about collapse—a failed marriage...
...Difficult as it is to have profound emotion toward the characters in The Easter Parade, it is equally difficult to read the book without wincing...
...Unfortunately, that is what she gets...
...Even Emily's nephew, the most successful man in The Easter Parade, is a priest with no ability to save others: His redemption consists of platitudes...
...Pookie Grimes, a divorced matron, fades into alcoholic senility, while her two daughters spend 200 pages growing to graceless middle age...
...The novel suggests that rescue would hardly be worth the trouble, since the sole inevitabilities are wrong turnings...
...The single oracle in The Easter Parade, in fact, is the author, who begins the novel with, the observation that "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life...
...Sarah, married to a boor who beats her, is occasionally sensitive, yet she is an almost total fool...
...when she offers Sarah sympathy, she is collecting details to intrigue the audience...
...Such disintegrations might be Yates' trademark...
...This reportorial tone might have meant boring reading if The Easter Parade had been written by a lesser author...
...It is tempting to interpret her failure as an indictment of feminism, a criticism of women who look for freedom and find nothing...
...But Emily herself realizes that she never made such a sophisticated decision...
...Yates is particularly good at exposing hypocrisy, whether it is pretended nobility or false independence...
...Yates has little sympathy for these characters...
...Like Scarlett O'Hara, she would prefer to think about it all tomorrow...
...No saint herself, Emily at least recognizes a bad deal...
...His attitude is suitable, for no one in the novel has enough dignity to be tragic or enough maturity to be criminal...
...each time, Emily exits rather than be depended upon...
...Every soap opera situation arises—from lovers' abandonments to unwanted pregnancies—and he treats them all matter-of-factly, without sentimentality...
...The Easter Parade continues the cynicism...
...Still, Emily is Yates' heroine, and the one figure who achieves some stature: When her downfall occurs, it seems less easy to bear...
...Yates keeps his promise...
...Emily has the same difficulty at 50 as at 16: She understands nothing...
...brought to her knees, she seems more human and less wholesome than ever...
...he condemns them with the implacability of a judge sending juvenile delinquents to jail...
...More caricatures than characters, these males represent every deadly sin, from envy to greed...
...Her moments with her last lover are embarrassing to both the reader and herself...
...Emily's brother-in-law, the worst she encounters, is a practically unbelievable amalgam of English public school society and American factory bully...
...Like actors in the ritual of the title, Yates' characters adopt patterns and images, putting on outworn finery so they may never realize that year after year, the Easter Parade is pretty much the same...
...Instead of overcoming weakness through the correct dosages of divorce and diary-keeping (or marriage and total womanhood), his characters try all these remedies only to find themselves no better off...
...Pleading "But I love the guy," she blubbers into her glass until she comes to a predictably bad end...
...With the possible exception of the girls' father, a failed newspaperman, everyone is as unthinkingly heartless as a child torturing animals...
...Yates is not truly concerned with sexuality or sexism except as possible vehicles of human suffering...
...His last book, Disturbing the Peace, is an exploration of the public and personal agonies endured by a successful businessman turned psychotic, and his collection of stories is entitled Eleven Kinds of Loneliness...
...By emphasizing that these events are commonplace, he both intensifies and reduces their horror...
Vol. 60 • March 1977 • No. 6
