Book Review: Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates

Little gets past the eyes of Richard Yates. He is a writer who can take a dismal, ordinary set of characters and make them into real, flesh and bone beings, simply by the way he describes their patterns of behavior, their mannerisms, their dialogue. Cold Spring Harbor is his last novel, published in 1986, and it carries with it all the benefits of being a Yates novel: spare yet descriptive, insightful dialogue about seemingly “simple things,” peppered with his acute observational skills for human behavior.

After having read a number of his novels now, I might actually go out on a limb and say I’ve not seen (at least from any published writer I’ve read), anyone convey the “ordinary man” as well as Yates can. Surely there have been great novelists in the past who have covered these themes (Frank Norris, John Steinbeck, and Theodore Dreiser all come to mind), but each writer, who is no less great in his own right, did not have this set out as his primary agenda. Since the above three all deal primarily with social issues as they pertain to the larger aspects of society, Yates primarily deals with the social issues as they pertain to the individual. And I don’t think I’ve ever read a writer who possessed such a skill to the degree Yates does.

His books have an odd sense of poetry about them, even though his prose is not, in and of itself, lyrical. The text reads rather straightforward when examined up close, but it is only when one peers from a distance, and looks at the story as a whole, that the poetic quality in his work can be seen. Cold Spring Harbor deals with a not-so-nice family who is not-so nice to one another. Gloria is the loopy, alcoholic mother (supposedly based on Yates’ own mother), Evan is the somewhat mediocre loser with no real ambition (his passion is for cars and when he meets Rachel, he puts aside his own ambitions so he can marry her - though this is not necessarily a tragic thing, since we can tell he’s not someone who would ever reach any potential worth noting) and Rachel’s teen brother Phil also has issues of his own (such as spying on his sister when she’s with her husband).

There isn’t really any character in the book who is likeable or worthy of being liked, yet via way of Yates’ writing, and his ability to delve into the human psyche, readers come to empathize with them, even if they’re not worthy of our affection. Set in a small Long Island town, Evan’s father Charles is still bitter about not having received any “recognition” for his participation in World War I, so he spends much of his time distancing himself from others. After Rachel and Evan marry, they move in with Rachel’s mother (Gloria) and her brother (Phil). After having just recently watched the film A Trip To Bountiful, (based on the play by Horton Foote) the situations in Cold Spring Harbor reminded me a bit of that, in that both A Trip To Bountiful and Cold Spring Harbor involve families who are stressed due to their having to live in such close proximity to one another. Also, both works involve that which goes unsaid among the characters.

Article Author: Jessica Schneider

Jessica Schneider is the Austin Cultural Events Examiner for Examiner.com. She writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer and has worked as the book editor of Monsters & Critics as well as being a co-founder of www.Cosmoetica.com

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