Cold Spring Harbor, (Paperback)

from novelcommentary

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 ...

from Donna828

One word can summarize this book. Disappointment. No, not in the writing or in the book itself, but disappointment by the male protagonists. Father and son, Charles and Evan Shepard, both fail to live out a dream of being a war hero. Charles arrived in France three days after the Great War ended ...

from AlisonY

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...

from stillatim

The last Yates I read, this was a pleasant surprise. Another reviewer suggested this is one for people to read who already like him, and I can see that. There's got to be some nostalgia going on: the book features all of Yates' (somewhat limited set of) characters. There's the sensitive unpopular...

from oldblack

This short novel is easy reading, yet there's an underlying depth which seems to say something fundamentally rather pessimistic about the state of male-female relationships in mid-20th century America. Actually, the pessimism seems to me to be directed a little more towards the male side of the r...