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tion is by Bohdan Rubchak. The
publisher is Ardis, Ann Arbor,
Michigan. The book sells as a
paperback at two dollars and
ninety-five cents.
ROBERT PHILLIPS:
One of
the functions of art is to create
order out of chaos. Much of
today's prose and poetry, how–
ever, seem in themselves chaotic
productions-works lacking in
form, vision, control, clarity–
and thereby failing to touch even
the outer rims of my sensibility.
Here are two books, one
fiction, one poetry, which seem
to marshal the events of decades
into patterns which create
shocks of recognition.
The Easter Parade,
Richard
Yates's fourth novel and fifth
work of fiction (Delacorte Press/
Seymour Lawrence) is a flawed
but memorable and moving
novel, one of the best I've read in
years, and superior to his more
recent,
A Good School.
In
its
depiction of the lives of the
Grimes sisters-the name itself
encompasses the grim and dirty
lot which life is to hand them–
Yates consciously or uncon–
sciously writes a modern version
of that 1908 favorite, Arnold
Bennett's
The Old Wives' Tale,
another fine novel of two ,sisters
who look for a satisfactory exis–
tence in different locales. Ben–
nett's Constance remains con–
stant at home in the small town;
PARTISAN REVIEW
his Sophia seeks sophistication
in the big city. Yet in the end,
Sophia must return to the roots
of her existence. So too with
Yates's Sarah and Emily. Sarah
marries early, lives in a small
town on Long Island. Emily
works in an advertising agency
in Manhattan, drifts from one
unsatisfactory love affair
to
another.
In
the end, Emily sadly
admits, ''I'm almost fifty-years–
old, and I've never understood
anything in my whole life."
Yates's vision is uncompro–
mising. Like a magnifying mir–
ror, he exposes every pore. In–
deed, there are a few too many
greasy mouths, rotten teeth,
sweaty armpits described in the
book.
Nothing
is left to the ima–
gination. Yates also loves irony
too well. One cannot quite be–
lieve, for instance, that the book
of a poet, Jack Flanders (one of
Emily's philanderers), would be
reviewed in the very same poetry
roundup in the same paper with
that of the one poet he had
despised while teaching with
him at Iowa, or that the critic
would praise the rival poet as
"audacious" -the favorite catch–
phrase of said poet, a phrase
which particularly had grated
on Flanders.
It
is all too neat, too
patently ironic.
This is indicative of what is
wrong with this otherwise fine
novel. The entire performance is
too
cool, too perfectly realized,
