Product Description

Robert Prentice has spent all his life attempting to escape his mother's stifling presence. His mother, Alice, for her part, struggles with her own demons as she attempts to realize her dreams of prosperity and success as a sculptor.

As Robert goes off to fight in Europe, hoping to become his own man, Richard Yates portrays a soldier in the depths of war striving to live up to his heroic ideals. With haunting clarity, Yates crafts an unforgettable portrait of two people who cannot help but hope for more even as life challenges them both.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #541688 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-10
• Released on: 2009-03-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307455956
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
“What’s exhilarating about Yates is not his grasp of The Truth, but the purity of his vision and the perfection of his craft.” —Newsday

“Yates writes powerfully and enters completely and effortlessly into the lives of his characters.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[Yates] is an expert.” —Time
-- Review

Review
“Soft-spoken in his prose and terrifyingly accurate in his dialogue, Yates renders his characters with such authenticity that you hardly realize what he's done.”
—The Boston Globe

"One of America's best-kept secrets. . . . Keenly insightful, brutally honest...delivering a swift kick to the heart."
—The Denver Post

“Yates writes powerfully and enters completely and effortlessly into the lives of his characters.”
—The New York Times Book Review

About the Author
Richard Yates was born in 1926. The author of several acclaimed works of fiction, including Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Disturbing the Peace, and The Easter Parade, he was lauded during his lifetime as the foremost novelist of the post-war "age of anxiety". He died in 1992.

Customer Reviews

Maybe his second best novel
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.

More mastery from one of America's best ever ...
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.

Two novels in one
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.