The critical consensus among the so-called literati is that Richard Yates’ best novel, by far, was his first book, Revolutionary Road; but this is pure bunkum, and an example of the worst sort of critical cribbing, wherein a meme about the quality of a work of art takes hold and then, despite obvious debunkings of it, remains entrenched. The result is that subsequent critics fail to form their own opinions, instead relying on information that is demonstrably wrong, but which will get them acceptance as a critic in the eyes of others.
A decade and a half after that book’s debut, in 1976, Yates wrote a significantly better book, The Easter Parade. No, that novel is not a masterpiece either — and has significant flaws, but it does represent a major improvement in terms of wordsmithing, maturity, and consistency in narrative, over the earlier book.
The later novel avoids the structural disaster of an opening that Revolutionary Road had, which plunged readers into the melodramatic maelstrom of a marriage between two lead characters they were given no time to empathize with. The Easter Parade opens, in retrospect, with, ‘Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.’ Ok, so it’s not a great opening, and given the Yatesian universe one might shrug their shoulders and say, ‘No shit?’ But, the rest of the opening pages neatly detail the lives of the two sisters- Sarah and Emily, so that by the time some ‘major events’ occur, we are in the same universe, if not shoes, of the Grimes girls.
Another flaw that Revolutionary Road had was its use of an omniscient narrator, which added to the telescoping effect of that book’s characterization. The reader never was allowed to occupy the shoes of those characters. While The Easter Parade also uses an omniscient narrator, the lack of melodramatic modifiers that inflict Revolutionary Road from its opening paragraph, as well as the brisk pacing and detailing of smaller moments in the lives of children, allows the reader to get into the characters’ shoes, even if they may never like the characters with whom they are walking.
Whereas Revolutionary Road was larded down in melodrama, The Easter Parade is much less weighted down. Yes, there is melodrama — about 25%, compared to the 75% of Revolutionary Road -- but the highs in the later book are also higher than the highs in the earlier one. The lone exception being that Revolutionary Road’s ending (after the predictable and soap operatic suicide of its lead female character) is better than The Easter Parade’s. Not that the later work’s end is bad — it’s quite good, but it is not as dramatic, daring, nor innovative as the earlier book’s; especially when compared to all the weak writing that preceded that earlier book’s end.
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