Richard Yates - The Easter Parade

The Easter Parade

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Epub ISBN 9781446433133

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Vintage 2008

8 10 9 7

Copyright Richard Yates 1976

Richard Yates has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in the United States in 1976 by Delacorte Press

First published in Great Britain in 1978 by Eyre Methuen

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099518563

To Gina Catherine

Richard Yates was born in 1926 in Yonkers, New York. After serving in the US Army during the Second World War, he worked as a publicity writer for the Remington Rand Corporation, and for a brief period in the sixties as a speech-writer for Senator Robert Kennedy. His prize-winning stories first appeared in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1962. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. Richard Yates was twice divorced and the father of three daughters. He died in 1992.

The Easter Parade is the best modern novel I have read this year

Julian Barnes

Few men since Flaubert have offered such sympathy to women whose lives are hell

Kurt Vonnegut

Richard Yatess best novel, which makes it wonderful. From the first sentence to the last I loved the book

Joan Didion

One of the United States finest post-war novelists and short-story writers. He wrote some of the best fiction of his generation; it continues to give pleasure to all those readers who are fortunate enough to discover it

Independent

A brave, brilliant book

Sunday Herald

As touching as it is real, as beautiful as it is sad. Like a softer, subtler, less salty Updike, Yates expounds a poignant, suburban American realism

Time Out

A tour de force an unflinching novel of rare power

Mordecai Richler

Invigorating and gripping every word works quietly to establish the illusion that things are happening by themselves A literary achievement

Time

Richard Yates is a writer of commanding gifts. His prose is urbane yet sensitive, with passion and irony held deftly in balance. And he provides unexpected pleasures in a flood of freshly minted phrases and in the thrust of sudden insight, precise notation of feeling, and mordant unsentimental perceptions

Saturday Review

Americas finest forgotten author a magnificent writer

The Times

Yates is a master

Sebastian Faulks

Yates is a realist par excellence. Read and weep

Kate Atkinson

Wonderful

Andre Dubus

The most perceptive author of the twentieth century

A magnificent writer

The Times

One of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century

Sunday Telegraph

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents divorce. That happened in 1930, when Sarah was nine years old and Emily five. Their mother, who encouraged both girls to call her Pookie, took them out of New York to a rented house in Tenafly, New Jersey, where she thought the schools would be better and where she hoped to launch a career in suburban real estate. It didnt work out very few of her plans for independence ever did and they left Tenafly after two years, but it was a memorable time for the girls.

Doesnt your father ever come home? other children would ask, and Sarah would always take the lead in explaining what a divorce was.

Do you ever get to see him?

Sure we do.

Where does he live?

In New York City.

What does he do?

He writes headlines. He writes the headlines in the New York Sun. And the way she said it made clear that they ought to be impressed. Anyone could be a flashy, irresponsible reporter or a steady drudge of a rewrite man; but the man who wrote the headlines! The man who read through all the complexities of daily news to pick out salient points and who then summed everything up in a few well-chosen words, artfully composed to fit a limited space there was a consummate journalist and a father worthy of the name.

Once, when the girls went to visit him in the city, he took them through the Sun plant and they saw everything.

The first editions ready to run, he said, so well go down to the pressroom and watch that; then Ill show you around upstairs. He escorted them down an iron stairway that smelled of ink and newsprint, and out into a great underground room where the high rotary presses stood in ranks. Workmen hurried everywhere, all wearing crisp little squared-off hats made of intricately folded newspaper.

Why do they wear those paper hats, Daddy? Emily asked.

Well, theyd probably tell you its to keep the ink out of their hair, but I think they just wear em to look jaunty.

What does jaunty mean?

Oh, it means sort of like that bear of yours, he said, pointing to a garnet-studded pin in the form of a teddy bear that shed worn on her dress that day and hoped he might notice. Thats a very jaunty bear.

They watched the curved, freshly cast metal page plates slide in on conveyor rollers to be clamped into place on the cylinders; then after a ringing of bells they watched the presses roll. The steel floor shuddered under their feet, which tickled, and the noise was so overwhelming that they couldnt talk: they could only look at each other and smile, and Emily covered her ears with her hands. White streaks of newsprint ran in every direction through the machines, and finished newspapers came riding out in neat, overlapped abundance.

Whatd you think of that? Walter Grimes asked his daughters as they climbed the stairs. Now well take a look at the city room.

It was an acre of desks, where men sat hammering typewriters. That place up front where the desks are shoved together is the city desk, he said. The city editors the bald man talking on the telephone. And the man over there is even more important. Hes the managing editor.