Cold Spring Harbour (1986) by Richard Yates (1926-1992) was the last of his seven novels. It was published when he was sixty, and it seems to me that he brought the wisdom of his years to paint an empathetic portrait of characters often overlooked in fiction. His central character Evan Shepard is a 'nobody' really... an unambitious man destined never to transcend his lowly status in so-called classless America. A foolish man incapable of sustained love and affection for anybody, who drifts through life not expecting much and not giving much to anyone else in return. His failures are mundane: a hasty adolescent marriage, an anxious relationship with his daughter, a second marriage brought undone by the stress of living in a shared household with tiresome in-laws. He flunks the medical for the one thing that might have offered some hope of advancement — enlistment for WW2.

(Yes, it seems bizarre that a war might do that, and yet many unskilled men learned a trade and acquired other skills in the forces, and — provided they made it through unscathed — with servicemen's postwar benefits, they made better lives for themselves afterwards.)

Despite Evan's unprepossessing character whose only advantage is his good looks, this unsentimental portait of failure is somehow endearing. Evan was a bit of a tearaway in his youth when his only love was cars, but his low-key efforts to turn over a new leaf with a job as a machinist are stymied by marrying too young, compromising his vague plans to save up the money to become a qualified mechanic. He remarries too soon which makes that even harder to achieve. Even his final betrayal has an inevitability about it once his wife reneges on their one chance to break free of the mother-in-law from hell.

His own mother is an alcoholic, a problem described as a nervous breakdown and hidden from the neighbours by his passive, stoic father who takes over all domestic responsibilities. Most of the time Grace is just wallpaper in this novel.

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As usual for Richard Yates this is a brutal dissection of the American dream. Everyone is unhappy, everyone's dreams are thwarted, everyone is trapped in some way. Very well written but didn't have the punch of Revolutionary Road. ( )

Finished Cold Spring Harbor this morning. This slight, multi-voiced novel is the second of Yates' that I have read. It reminds me of Revolutionary Road with similar themes of unhappy suburban life, of men especially unfulfilled, feeling like it is their right to drink excessively, cheat on their wives, and blame the circumstances of timing on the lost opportunities of their careers. In this novel the circumstances include missing out on the action of both World Wars, Charles Shepard, and then Evan , his son. Evan is introduced earlier as the 17 year old son who finally found his love of cars that distract him away form being a bully and a lout. His father didn't know what to do with him but in a line that seems to be the chorus here "maybe all you could ever do, beyond suffering, was wait and see what might be going to happen next." Evan is a handsome young man and his confidence when driving a car makes him appealing to first Mary and then after that ill fated early marriage breaks up, Rachel, who he meets when his car breaks down in Greenwich Village. "There might still be times in Evan Shepard’s life when he was afraid he wouldn’t amount to much, but he always knew what he looked like, and he knew it gave him a decided advantage with girls." Evan's second marriage to Rachel allows the author to explore the intertwining of two families, both who are living with mothers whose mental health make it difficult for the men in the house. Mostly these portraits are unflattering but precise in their depiction and Yates does a nice job of chronicling this period of the failed American Dream. ( )

Cold Spring Harbor was Yates' final novel, written in 1986 but set between the two World Wars.

Evan Shepard, a young man with a 'busy' past, meets the Drakes when his car breaks down outside their house in Manhattan. Falling in love with young Rachel Drake, he anticipates that their marriage will herald a new start in his life, but when they move back to his home town of Cold Spring Harbor the pressures of sharing a home with his wife's family begin to take their toll.

This novel lacked some of the poignancy and raw emotion of Revolutionary Road and Easter Parade, and I didn't fall in love with characters as much as I have in Yates' other books, but it was still a novel that I didn't want to put down from page one.

3.5 stars - a good read, but by Yates' own standard, not a great read. ( )

Very good writing, period piece, 1940's, suburban Long Island -- if you care. Lots of stupid white people with no birth control being neurotic, chaotic, pretentious, unclear, gay, depressed. Why would I spend an evening with these unredeeming people who never really get themselves together? Just to find out if there might be redemption, and I have zero desire to read about the suburbs any more. This and Richard Ford - great writing, uninteresting subject for me. ( )