Customer Reviews

Cold Spring Harbor

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are authors, the critics will tell you, that do their best to try to portray the life American. They reach in, they say, and pull out what it feels like to be an everyday Joe, living, breathing, working, making love, and dying. Readers flock to these types of authors because humans are, it seems, naturally disposed to enjoy watching the descent of those around us, especially those with whom we can relate. These authors are experts in showing us what it's like to be human. These authors are the experts in telling the stories of those around us.

Richard Yates is not one of those authors. For one, readers somehow never flocked to him. And more importantly, Richard Yates does far more than simply tell the stories of those around us. He tells us the story of ourselves. It's through this looking glass that we see not what life could be or should be. What Richard Yates gives us is a picture of what life is.

There are no happy endings. There are no great periods of redemption and reclamation. The boy doesn't always get the girl and the good side doesn't always win.

This is life. It is often sad. It is often brutal. And it is always, when you strip away the color, honest. So too is the writing of Richard Yates. And Cold Spring Harbor is no exception.

Admittedly, the writing itself can be garbled, and the storyline is not as tight as his other works (Revolutionary Road is brilliant). But the message is clear; our lives are more filled with hopelessness than with hope. With regret rather than triumph. And with sadness more than joy. This book, like his others is brutal, honest and true.

Four Stars.

I read Revolutionary Road a few weeks ago (maybe 2 weeks ago) and immediately ordered a few more by Yates. I'm a big dummy for not knowing this guy sooner. He's a great writer and this particular novel doesn't skip a beat in comparison to Revolutionary Road (also brilliant). No plot reviews here (except to say when the car breaks down, some worlds change) ... buy the thing ... support the craft that is way too quickly dying from brain damaging electronics ...

Make believe I'm Obama and trust me on this book ... then order (or go to a library) and read it.

I'm starting to feel a little sad because before long, I'll have read all of Richard Yate's books. A wonderful author who really only became recognized after his death. Fans love his marvelous portrayal of the all American family in the 1940-50s America, exposing their warts and all. With Yates, the reader learns quickly that oftentimes, life and relationships just plain suck, and some people just seem to create their own misery. Cold Spring Harbor, is such a story. It's about unhappy people who make bad decisions to perpetuate their misery. It's was a terrific reading experience.

The novel takes place in a Long Island, New York town just before WWII. The father figure, Charles Shepard, is a retired WWI Army officer who never fulfilled his military dreams. Three days before the war ended he began to lose his eye site. He marries a pretty girl named Grace, retires on a small Army pension, and buys a small house in Cold Spring Harbor, but their life is anything but happy.

Grace, is hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, acts like an invalid, and before long becomes an alcoholic. Her husband Charles does all the housework, the shopping and even fixes drinks for the two of them every evening. Their handsome son Evan's life is just as dysfunctional. He is obsessed with cars, gets in trouble, has fits of anger and no ambition. When Evan's first marriage ends quickly, the twenty-three year-old, moves back home with his parents. One day Charles decides to discuss the situation with his son, as Evan drives him to his eye appointment in Manhattan. When their car brakes down in Greenwich Village, they need to use a telephone and they end up at the pitiful home of Gloria Drake and her adult children Rachel and Phil.

"She may not have been more than fifty, but there wasn't much left of whatever she had in the way of looks. Her hair was a blend of faded yellow and light gray, as if dyed by many years of drifting cigarette smoke, and although you could say she kept her figure, it was such a frail, slack little figure that you couldn't picture it doing anything but sitting right here, on this coffee-stained sofa. Her very way of sitting suggested an anxious need to be heard and understood, and to be liked if possible: hunched forward with her forearms on her knees and her clasped hands writhing to the rhythms of her own talk."

Without giving out away too much of this brief (182 page) novel, I'll just say that things go from bad to worse for Evan, and really for both families for that matter. Yates demonstrates with unflinching honesty what can happen when people make bad choices in life. We see what can happen when unrealistic dreams go unfulfilled. Once again Yates has created sympathetic characters, brought together by chance and desperation, characters that you will not easily forget.

The character of Gloria Drake is said to be based on that of Ruth Yate's, mother of the author who had already passed away at the time this novel was written. From what I've read about Yates, most of his novels are based at least in part on real life situations.

This novel is beautifully written and did not disappoint. I would highly recommend it to everyone.

This belongs in any short list of novels about alienation.

The reviews emphasize that this is a novel about a group of lost people, struggling through problems that are largely of their own doing. Fair enough. Evan Shepherd seems to never make the right choice. The Shepherd ability to judge character poorly seems to pass along from generation to generation. The only difference is their response. Whereas Charles hangs on to his alcoholic wife, Evan escapes.

I was still searching for a sense of a meaning about this book all the way to the last sentence. That sentence, spoken by Rachel to her newborn son, seems to add one more layer of dark wit. Rachel, the wife of Evan, is nursing her son the morning after a fight with Evan. Evan has left, and unknown to Rachel, intends to start up again with his first wife. Rachel's words seem to indict both Evan and all men in general. "You're a miracle," she says, "because do you know what you are going to be? You are going to be a man."

To me, that is especially dark, because it would seem to mean that she is consigning her future expectations of Evan, Jr., to the same path worn by his father.

In the end, I don't know of this book has one main idea. Instead, it seems content to show the reader a contrary vision of life after World War II. This is not a book about plenty, about men coming home with pride, about love of family and institutions. These are not the people that Studs Terkel wrote about in the Good War.

This could hardly be more different. The war has touched the lives of these men. Charles Shepard must go to great lengths to explain that he was not a war hero. Flash Ferris dreams of joining the marines, but it is only a dream. Evan himself is rejected for physical deficiencies.

This could be one of those novels that successfully undermines the notion of white Protestant virtue. Both Evan and his friend, Flash, attend elite private schools. Even Phil, cast as unfortunate because he has no money for a bike and needs to get a summer job, is still going off to board in the fall. In spite of their class status, most of these characters are not weighed down by any kind of noblesse oblige. With the exception of Phil, who stands up for the right thing, these people are ready to turn on each other at a whim or convenience. They drink badly. They don't serve their country.

I love Richard Yates' style with words. It reminds of his contemporay, Evan S. Connell (Mrs. Bridge, and later, Mr. Bridge), for its deliberate realism. Many of the pages career back and forth along the wayward doubts that fill the heads of Evan, Phil, and Rachel. This is a rare kind of writing that seems to have disappeared in the last few years.

Yates has a way of recycling the same characters, the alcoholic mom who moves around a lot, the son searching for his own identity, but he's such an engaging writer! All his books but one are worthwhile. For an in-depth critique, google "Stewart O'Nan Richard Yates."

The other reviewers have this one pegged. It is about poor choices, disappointment, and alienation. It is about dumb choices and poor judgement. Yates does a good job of putting the reader right into the morass of such a sad environment. When the reader wades through this book you are transported to that place through smart dialogue and vivid imagery. It is well paced and thoughtful, and it is never boring. So if your life is boring or you do not have many problems in your life, get this one and take a trip to a darker side of life. Get it and enjoy!!!!

Using the same characters that made up the sum of his life, he manages to bring some more subtle insight into the morphing situations. I disagree with the statements made about the "lack of redemtion" of his stories. As far as I am concerned there is always at least one paragraph in each book that points to possible redemtion--you just have to digest the the miserable process to find that glimmer - much like our own lives.

This is one of those books that you stick with in hopes that the plot gets better. And as it does you realize you are nearing the end and are hoping for something, just to get to the last page and feel like you've wasted your time reading the book at all.

A far, far cry from Revolutionary Road, I am done with Mr. Yates.

I realize Yates reached a peak of popularity, especially with his book turned movie, Revolution, but I was neither impressed with the story line or his writing style. I do not recommend.

the contents of cold spring harbor, a very short novel, are suffocated by yates' use of judgment-loaded adjectives and adverbs. hemingway said it all when he advised writers to send a telegram if they wanted to send a message.