Cold Spring Harbor

In a small Long Island town during the first months of World War II, Evan Shepard, a young machinist married for the second time, agrees to share a house with his wife's family and becomes torn by divided loyalties

The central "character" and enveloping presence in this novel is a "whole rotten little town" on the north shore of Long Island. In no sense the Cold Spring Harbor of the tourists and summer people, it is the dismal home base where the characters live out their disappointments and aborted hopes in the period before and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Evan Shepherd, a lout as boy and man, a machinist in love with cars, is the son of a retired Army officer reduced to the role of valet to his neurasthenic, alcoholic second wife, Rachel, daughter of a garrulous, socially pretentious alcoholic madwoman. Rachel's brother Phil, a 16-year-old prep-school student, is the only character who might conceivably develop into a substantial person. The lives portrayed are bleak, trivial, thwarted, vapid, but they are made memorable against all odds by Yates's high virtue as a writer. The power demonstrated in his earlier work (A Good School; The Easter Parade is reconfirmed here; he can bring a scene, a subject, a character to sharply detailed focus through an unswerving fidelity to the grim truths of existence, related in a clear and ringing prose.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The setting is a small Long Island town on the eve of World War II. Denied his chance for glory in World War I, Charles Shepard lives on a small army pension, his alcoholic wife a bitter reminder of his thwarted dreams. Their son Evan has a short, disastrous marriage when young, then passes up college to marry Rachel Drake. Happiness eludes Evan and Rachel when they opt to move in with Rachel's mother and brother. The strain of adjusting to his new familyand resentment over skipping college and failing his military physicallead Evan to start an affair with his ex-wife, even though Rachel is pregnant. Overwhelmed by their dreary prospects, effectively depicted by Yates's terse prose, the characters live in hope that something good might happen. Recommended for large fiction collections. Michael J. Esposito, formerly with Special Libraries Assn . , Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.