Customer Reviews

A Special Providence: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
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Richard Yates is underappreciated. The general reading public doesn't know him. He had all but faded into literary history after his death until a recent short story collection revived interest in his work. But discerning readers of modern fiction have always placed him in the same literary class as John Cheever, John Updike and the other better-known modernists of the second half of the 20th century. His best-selling and arguably best novel was his first, Revolutionary Road, which captured 1950s suburban angst about as well as anybody. His second novel, which was published fully eight years later, is A Special Providence. It is not well known but it, too, is an excellent work. It tells the story of a mother and her son. It focuses partly on the mother's constant and fruitless search for artistic respect and financial security as well as on the son's experiences during World War II. Unlike some Yates novels, A Special Providence holds together from beginning to end. But it is especially strong in describing the son's relatively brief and unfulfilling war experiences in the European theater. Yates certainly isn't known as an adventure writer, but A Special Providence reveals his ability to create a compelling, fast-paced narrative when the story calls for it. In fact, Yates is at his best when he is in the midst of a strong bit of narrative. Some of his other novels ultimately failed, and failed to draw readers, because they descended for prolonged periods into plodding narrative and excessive introspection. This doesn't happen much in A Special Providence, and that's why it's at least his second best novel.

Yates tells two related stories -- one focused on a mother, the other on her son -- in quiet, elegant prose. The son's is a war story: a young soldier at the end of World War II yearns for heroism but, in small ways, consistently disappoints himself. His story is gripping, but in some ways his mother's smaller story is more compelling. Just as her son fantasizes about being a hero, she clings to an unrealistic vision of herself as a successful artist while enduring (bravely or blindly) the disappointments that comprise her life. Yates concludes the novel by bringing the two stories together in what seems like an inevitable conclusion to the mother's life of disappointment.

The mother and son are realistic, multidimensional characters. They aren't easy to like but, more importantly, they aren't easy to forget.

If you're looking for a happy, Pollyannish ending, this is a book you'll want to avoid. If you're looking for a wonderfully written novel about adversity that conveys a feeling of truth, A Special Providence is worth your time. If I could, I would give it 4 1/2 stars.

This one was the perfect cap to the Yates collection for me ... mostly because now I can begin rereading his masterful collection, but also because it dealt with (I suspect) his time in the Army during the close of WWII. The back and forth, mom and son, worked well and Yates ability with open endings is overwhelming. Perhaps, the most underappreciated American writer ever, Yates is a pure pleasure to read. He knows how to touch on every single thread of the human condition and to make it vibrate so it can't be ignored.

the ultimate choice any man had to make before becomming an adult--is described here with more sympathy for the mother than Yates was later to do.

I do not enjoy war writing so I do not know if it was good or bad, but the character of the mother rang true on many levels - how hard it is to pursue the arts and be a reasonable parent---it did not really matter if she was talented or not--the relationship would have still been complicated, but her mediocrity made it even sadder.

Yates can make something unbearable pleasurable---that is becasue of his brilliance as a writer.

It is no rev road--- that was the masterwork--this is a chamber piece - both are important for serious readers to partake of.

Reading Blake Bailey's biography of novelist Richard Yates (A Tragic Honesty) helped me understand the stories behind the novels--and so, better understand the novels themselves. Not only the real-life bases for so many situations and details within Yates's novels (his work was unabashedly autobiographical); but also the circumstances in which much of the writing took place.

A Special Providence, which followed Revolutionary Road and a story collection called Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, presented Richard Yates with two challenges. It was Yates's second novel, the classic potential pitfall for a novelist with one successful book under his belt: Can he pull it off again? The other challenge was that Yates had not one but two parallel stories he wanted to tell. First, he wanted to deal with his claustrophobic relationship with his mother; and second, he wanted to write about being a square peg, as usual, as a soldier in World War II.

Yates struggled with this novel for a very long time, and the critical response when it finally arrived was not favorable overall. Most critics found fault--appropriately, I think--with Yates's attempt to integrate the two stories with the device of a prologue, two parts, 1 and 2; and an epilogue. But it's a far stronger book than I was led to expect.

A sensitively written chronicle of two lives in parallel, based on the author's own life experiences. The war scenes are stirring and have an authentic air about them that only someone who has experienced war first hand could convey. Despite the fact that Yates himself expressed disappointment with this work, I was surprised to find it so gripping. I highly recommend this book to anyone who admires Richard Yates based on his more famous novel, Revolutionary Road.

After reading Revolutionary Road and being mightily impressed I obtained almost all of Richard Yates' works and started with A Special Providence. Not for Yates any romantic notions about war or the hardships of life and love in general. This book is no exception. There's a toughness and poignancy in Yates' prose and in the content of the story that strikes a chord of reality. It's not maudlin nor morose, more matter of fact which I think makes it more telling. There's always lots of alcohol being consumed, cigarettes being smoked and dreams evaporating for the characters that people his stories. They have impossible longings and are always flawed like most of us. Yea, Yates tells it like it is.

I find war novels hard to read and WW2 novels the hardest of all. War defeats character, nuance and shading. That said, Yates does a good job giving Robert Prentice enough individuality and self absorption to stand out amidst the dying days of the War against the Germans. Still, I had to make myself read those sections.

It's the characterization of Alice Prentice that stands out as brilliant. She is an "artist," an alcoholic, a rebel against orthodoxy, an entitled dreamer who believes that the rules of ordinary life don't apply to her. I saw how her romanticism about herself could be contagious to others. There is a courage as well as a pettiness about Alice. That she loves her son, I had no doubt but the book makes clear that its not the quantity of love that matters but the quality. I didn't like Alice but I did admire her reckless courage and her unceasing energy even if it lacked focus.

Yates has been compared to Updike and Cheever but in this book at least he fails to convey the social world Alice inhabited. Its a fuzzy abstraction populated with a few choice characters but no real context. This would have been made Alice more credible. Her relationship with her husband didn't come alive for me, mostly because I didn't see how he would function in a corporate culture married to someone like Alice.

Not enough can be said about Yates. In my mind he is probably the best American writer as I can't think of anyone who comes close to his word magic!

A Distant Second to Revolutionary Road.

Yates draws some compelling characters in this drama about a mother's inability to come to terms with a cruel world that doesn't give a damn about her 3rd rate artwork, and her son, a young private in the army during WWII. There were some poignant moments and Yates, as always, shows us the dirty underside of the american dream, but he strays too far from these strengths in A Special Providence.

Half the novel takes place in a war setting, and frankly, Yates' war-writing is some of the least memorable I've ever read. Try Mailer or Herr or Heller if that's what you're looking for. Another annoying tidbit is the repetitiveness of the narrative.

Anyway, it's a pretty good read, but nothing "great". Yates is better when he stays closer to home. This story is not as tightly wound as Rev Road, and we don't care about the characters nearly as much. Okay, that's my two cents.