Cold Spring Harbor, Richard Yates’s ninth book, is a masterly tale about unsettled lives in crisis and in conflict. The time is the first year of the Second World War; the place is a small Long Island town.Evan Shepard, a young machinist newly married to his second wife and expecting his second child, is rejected by the Army and impelled toward a former vague ambition to enroll in engineering school. For the sake of economy he agrees to share a house with his wife’s mother and young brother, establishing an artificial family that soon engenders only tension and discomfort for all of its well-meaning members.Evan’s pregnant wife, Rachel, is a woman of childlike innocence, now town by divided loyalties. Her mother is Gloria Drake, divorced and hopelessly infatuated with Evan’s father—a woman who never stops talking and whose yearning for a “congenial” new life can rise to hysterical intensity. And Rachel’s beloved brother, Phil, has become a painfully awkward adolescent racked with embarrassment and desire. These characters dwell in what each considers to be a noble isolation as they seek to protect others and yet find no protection for themselves.Opposed beyond endurance at home, Evan is drawn once again to the stunning Mary Donovan, his high school sweetheart and first wife, who now, with their appealing daughter, seems to embody a bright promise of escape and renewal.Described by The New York Times Book Review as “one of a handful of American novelists…who may be said to have a ‘vision of life,’” Richard Yates brings his vision to bear on a time, a people, and a place, infusing his characters and their feelings with breath, leaving them to linger in the reader’s imagination long after the novel’s end.
What do You think about Cold Spring Harbor (1986)?
