Rating: 
Summary: Gripping and poignant, but overly fatalistic
Review: This sad and beautifully written novel about the relationship of two sisters from their girlhood in the 1930s to middle age in the 1970s gets under your skin, sometimes almost in spite of itself. What I found most effective were the characterizations (among the most interesting are their gentle, alcoholic dad, as well as the rather creepy academic Andrew Crawford and the blocked poet Jack Flanders - Yates is particularly good at self-hating intellectuals); the author's graceful and seemingly effortless prose; and the overarching mood of Chekhov-like melancholy empathy that is quite poignant. I think the major flaw is Yates' overly fatalistic conception of his characters and their lives. I just couldn't buy the idea that Emily - a woman who, after all, got an education and pursued a career in the 40s and 50s, a time when it took a great deal of personal strength to resist "the feminine mystique" - would be so unbelievably passive, both at work and in her personal life. Throughout the book, she's basically unhappy, and near the end, she has a total meltdown. Yet not until the final pages does she make any attempt to help herself. But long before that, wouldn't she, at the very least, have gone into psychoanalysis? After all, it was what people of that class and that era DID! Nevertheless, this book has undeniable power. I thought the ending was wonderfully handled. By that time Emily is in enormous pain, but Yates shows you the faintest glimmer of light shining through the darkness. Given the unremitting bleakness of so much of this book, the possibility of redemption - however qualified - is welcome, because its adds depth and complexity to the occasionally unearned despair of Yates' vision.
Rating: 
Summary: The Man Who Haunts Our Lives
Review: Yates could write. He could write with more intensity than anyone out there. In Easter Parade, like Revolutionary Road, Yates allows the actions and the characters of the novel to speak for themselves, a technique he acquired from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Chekhov. You won't find any pompous moralizing from this guy, he just gives you the straight poop. Unlike other writers who would insert their egotistical presence into every line, Yates, instead, chooses to sit back and let the action develop without any pause. That's why reading Yates is so powerful, like a tidal wave. He just doesn't let up and he holds nothing back.
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