Books: The Two Sisters

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,...