Special Providence, A

This is a special book from a very special writer. I absolutely am in love with his prose and think he should be read and loved by everyone. If you like Hemingway, Faulkner, Salter et al, you will absolutely LOVE Yates.

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.

This is the story of a divorced and widowed mother’s suffocating love for her only son. Alice Prentice and Bobby endure numerous ordeals after the death of her husband George. Like characters in other Yates novels, Alice is a frustrated artist, a sculptor. She lives beyond her means and in the years before his fatal heart attack George tries to get her to rein in her spending. Bobby is sent to a boarding school (comparison here with A Good School, another Yates title) until the fees get into arrears. It’s a pillar-to-post life. For Bobby, mollycoddled and keen for a change of scene, the Army gives him a sense of purpose. He finds himself a participant in the final months of World War Two, prior to the Allied victory, disappointed that he didn’t have more of a chance to be a hero (a theme also explored in Yates’s Cold Spring Harbor). But he discovers himself, gaining in confidence, free from his mother’s apron strings, while she waits for his letters in New York - reminiscing about the close relationship they once had, and determined to resume her sculpture work. Yates is fascinated by disappointment and failure: his characters never quite get a lucky break, or if they do it doesn’t last for long. A Special Providence is one of his best novels, more satisfying than the better-known Cold Spring Harbor. The description of combat is well done and makes this, in places, as much a wartime adventure novel as an exploration of a mother’s love. Yates’s later work, brilliant in a different way, became more preoccupied with mental illness and alcoholism, both only hinted at here. It’s a clever and highly readable study of love, friendship, despair, failure - and growing up.

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.

When you read Yates you know you are getting the truth. What emerges is the tragedy of ordinary lives - yes, there is nobleness in an ordinary life. Yates writes about the real world that we inhabit, not the fanciful one inhabited by glorified heroes. The lives of his characters play out with their all their shortcomings, their uncertainties about where they are going, and their indecision, in a way that reflects the confusion and uncertainty that lies at the heart of living in this world.