Jacket Copy: Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship with their absent father, and later her seemingly golden marriage. The path she chooses for herself is less safe and conventional and her love affairs never really satisfy her. Although the bond between them endures, gradually the distance between the two women grows, until a tragic event throws their relationship into focus one last time. Richard Yates's masterful novel follows the two sisters from their childhood in the 1920s through the challenges of their adult choices, and depicts the different ways they seek to escape from their tarnished family past.
Similar to: Virginia Woolf's "The Years"; Richard Ford; Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire
Why I am Getting Tired of Richard Yates: I would like to see just one women character in a Richard Yates novel who is not an alcoholic. Just one. Also, a dude who is not completely against the idea of monogamy. They exist. Also, how am I supposed to like any of the male characters in the novels when they all beat their wives? One of my biggest turn-offs for books is when they don't have a single character that I can admire. I would also like to see Yates treat abortion with more sensitivity and attention to the psychological issues that accompany it (the way Didion does). He shouldn't even mention it at all if he's just going to mention it for a second, just state that it happened, and then act like it had no impact on her mental state or her later life whatsoever. Also, his novels tell wonderful stories and include extraordinary depths of character development. Narrative ability and description are definitely his greatest strengths. What the novels lack however, is a point, or a conclusion that the reader is supposed to come to at the end of the novel. What universal message about life and the world are we supposed to take away from Yates' novels? I have only the very vaguest idea.
No comments:
Post a Comment