The Two Sisters

By Paul Gray

THE EASTER PARADE

by RICHARD YATES

229 pages. Delacorte. $7.95.

Marital dry rot in suburbia. A clinging mama and her growing-up boy. An alcoholic advertising salesman in search of himself. These are three of the whitest elephants in the attic of contemporary fiction--and Author Richard Yates, 50, has devoted a tight, pellucid novel to each one. An odd but not inconsiderable literary achievement, particularly in an age so helplessly smitten with the new. Yates' work brands him as a traditionalist in the strictest sense: he is a writer who feels dutybound to tell familiar stories in conventional ways.

It is not surprising, then, that The Easter Parade picks up a subject that is already senile through overuse: unfulfilled women, married and single. Yates briskly traces some 40 years in the lives of two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes. When their parents are divorced, the little girls grieve over the loss of their loving, ineffectual father. Neither one has much luck with men after that. Sarah eventually marries a habitual wife beater (because, in 1941, he looks "just like Laurence Olivier") and stoically takes her lumps for two decades. Emily wins a college scholarship, is briefly married to an impotent philosophy professor and then goes through several New York City careers (publishing, advertising, etc.) and a long line of lovers. When the last one leaves her, she wakes up to what her face in the mirror reveals: "a middle-aged woman in hopeless and terrible need."

Yates can make reading about humdrum pathos -- the slow smashup of befuddled lives -- invigorating and even gripping. He knows how to pace his material for maximum interest -- when to summarize, when to show a scene in full. The dialogue is artful enough to sound natural. In his descriptive prose every word works quietly to inspire the illusion that things are happening by themselves. Even Emily's walk-on lovers are able to stand -- as characters -- on their own two legs.

Many readers now expect their slice of life to be served up with a side order of irony or existential razzmatazz.They will not find it in The Easter Parade. Yates does not condescend to his heroines; he refuses to strike attitudes about their failures or mock their limitations. "I'm almost 50 years old," Emily says at the end, "and I've never understood anything in my whole life."

Why not? The author, naturalistically, does not explain what Emily cannot understand, but the answer is manifest on every page of the novel. The thing gone wrong in the Grimes sisters' lives is life itself.

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