{"product_id":"a-special-providence-isbn-9780307455956","title":"A Special Providence","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eRevolutionary Road\u003c\/i\u003e, comes the story of a mother who struggles with her own demons while her son goes to fight in Europe, hoping to become his own man.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eLike Breakfast At Tiffany's\u003c\/i\u003e spliced with \u003ci\u003eAll Quiet On The Western Front\u003c\/i\u003e. Impossible to paraphrase, wonderful to read.\" —Zadie Smith, bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eWhite Teeth \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRobert Prentice has spent all his life attempting to escape his mother's stifling presence. His mother, Alice, for her part, is attempting to realize her dreams of prosperity and success as a sculptor. As Robert goes off to fight in Europe, Richard Yates portrays a soldier in the depths of war striving to live up to his heroic ideals. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith haunting clarity, Yates crafts an unforgettable portrait of two people who cannot help but hope for more even as life challenges them both.\"Like Breakfast At Tiffany's spliced with All Quiet On The Western Front. Impossible to paraphrase, wonderful to read.\" —Zadie Smith, bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eWhite Teeth\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Soft-spoken in his prose and terrifyingly accurate in his dialogue, Yates renders  his characters with such authenticity that you hardly realize what he's done.” —\u003ci\u003eThe  Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"One of America's best-kept secrets.... Keenly insightful, brutally  honest ... delivering a swift kick to the heart.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Denver Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Yates writes  powerfully and enters completely and effortlessly into the lives of his characters.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eRichard Yates\u003c\/b\u003e was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, \u003ci\u003eRevolutionary Road\u003c\/i\u003e, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels \u003ci\u003eA Good School, The Easter Parade, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eDisturbing the Peace, \u003c\/i\u003eand two collections of short stories, \u003ci\u003eEleven Kinds of Loneliness \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eLiars in Love\u003c\/i\u003e. He died in 1992.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Commence—fire!\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The blast of rifles shocked his ears, right and  left; he squeezed the trigger and felt the stock of his own rifle drive hard into  his shoulder and cheek, and then he fired again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e They were lying prone on a damp  Virginia ridge, firing down across a dismal slope of weeds at a simulated enemy position  several hundred yards away—a group of crude wooden house fronts flanked by clumps  of trees. Gray silhouette targets darted in and out of view at the windows and came  irregularly up from foxholes among the trees, and at first Prentice didn't aim at  them very precisely: the main thing seemed to be to keep firing, to get off as many  rounds as the men on either side of him. But after a few seconds the tension eased  off and he became both careful and fast. It was exhilarating.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Cease fire! Cease  fire! All right, fall back. Everybody back. Second squad, let's go. Second squad  up on the line.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Prentice locked his rifle, got up, and stumbled back down the ridge  with the others to where a small, painstakingly built campfire was struggling for  survival. He made his way into the huddle of men surrounding it and found a place  to stand beside John Quint.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Think you hit anything, Deadeye?\" Quint asked him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A couple, I think. I'm pretty sure I got a couple, anyway. You?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Hell, I don't  know.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was the last afternoon of the week's bivouac that was the climax of their  training. Any day now they would be shipped out for overseas processing, and the  company's morale could not have been lower, but Prentice had begun to feel an unreasonable  elation. It pleased him to know that he hadn't bathed or changed his clothes for  six days, that he was learning to handle his rifle as an extension of himself, and  that he'd taken part in elaborate field problems without doing anything noticeably  absurd. A pleasant little spasm of shuddering seized him; he squared his shoulders,  set his feet wider apart, and briskly rubbed his hands together in the woodsmoke.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Hey Prentice,\" said Novak, who had been watching him from the other side of the  fire. \"You feeling pretty sharp today? You feeling like a real fighting man?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This  caused a chuckle around the group, and Cameron, a big Southerner who was Novak's  friend, did his best to keep it going. \"Old Prentice gunna be a regular tiger, ain't  he? Jesus, I'm glad he's on our side.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He tried to ignore them, continuing to rub  his hands and stare down into the weak flames, but the sound of their bored, easy  laughter had spoiled his mood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Hardly any of the men in his platoon were less than  five years older than Prentice; some were thirty and a few were nearly forty, and  a more surly, less amiable crowd he could never have imagined. Like him, they had  all come to Camp Pickett from other branches of the service--this whole training  regiment, in fact, was what the Army called an Infantry Re-Tread Center--but there  was a considerable difference between his case and theirs. He was a veteran of nothing  more than six weeks of mild and pampered training as an Air Force recruit, followed  by a shapeless month of work details in something called a Casual Company; the others  were all old-timers. Some were from recently dissolved Anti-Aircraft units, in which  they had idled for years at the gun emplacements around West Coast defense plants;  some were from Ordnance or Quartermaster depots; there were ex-cooks and ex-clerks  and ex-orderlies, and there were washouts from various officer-candidate schools.  Many of them were noncoms in line or technical grades and continued to wear their  impotent chevrons, but all of them—every foulmouthed, hard-drinking, complaining  one of them—had in common the miserable fact that their good deals, their months  or years of military safety were over. They were replacement riflemen.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And if Prentice  had entertained any notion of being called \"Bob\" or \"Slim\" or \"Stretch\" by these  men, of relaxing with them in the easy camaraderie of his Air Force days, it was  a hope he'd had to abandon at once. They called him \"Kid\" or \"Junior\" or \"Prentice\"  or nothing at all, and their general indifference had soon turned into a contemptuous  amusement.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e On the very first morning, late for Reveille and sleepily fumbling with  his unfamiliar infantry leggings, he had put the damned things on backwards, with  the hook lacings on the inside rather than the outside of his calves; he had taken  four running steps across the barracks floor before the lacing hooks of one legging  caught the lace of the other, and down he came—all gangling, flailing six-foot-three  of him—in a spectacular lock-legged fall that left his audience weak with laughter  for the rest of the day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And thereafter he had gone from bad to worse. He was incurably  clumsy at close-order drill; he couldn't perform the manual of arms without an unsightly  dipping of his head when he wrenched open the rifle's chamber; in the field his spindly,  ill-coordinated body was put to tests of reflex and endurance that seemed wholly  beyond its powers, and he repeatedly floundered and failed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Worse still, he found  himself unable to accept his defeats with any kind of grace. He would rise from each  humiliation with a mouthful of shrill obscenities, trying by sheer verbal unpleasantness  to beat these laughing bastards at their own game, and the result of this was to  lower him still further in their esteem. An all-around incompetent was bad enough,  and a wet-behind-the-ears young twerp of an incompetent was worse; but when he turned  out to be a little wise guy too--when he swore not only in bad temper but in what  sounded like the clipped, snotty accents of a spoiled rich kid--that was too much.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And then one morning after bayonet drill, when the company was marched into a stifling  clapboard building for its weekly I. and E. lecture, he found a way in which his  luck might possibly begin to change. The lecture was as tedious as ever: first a  documentary film, thunderously identified on the screen as one of the Why We Fight  series, which explained the evils of Nazi Germany in simple-minded words and pictures;  then a droning talk by a bored-looking second lieutenant who explained it all over  again, and then the question period.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A man several seats away from Prentice got  up to raise a question—a quiet ex-Ordnance man from Idaho whom he'd sometimes noticed  smoking a pipe in the post library, a man named John Quint—and from the moment he  began to talk Prentice sat spellbound.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"I'd like to take issue, sir, with one or  two of the points made in the movie just now. Actually, they're things I've noticed  cropping up time and again in the Army's indoctrination program, and I think we might  do well to examine them a little more closely...\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It wasn't what he said that mattered,  though all of it was interesting and thoughtful; it was the remarkable ease and confidence  of his delivery. Here was a man who couldn't have been more than twenty-four or five--and  a bespectacled, almost prissy-looking man at that, a man whose vocabulary and enunciation  clearly marked him as \"cultivated\"--and without the slightest compromise, without  any hint of talking down to them, he was holding the respectful attention of every  muscle-headed slob in the room. He even got a few laughs--not by any clumsy descent  into G.I. humor, but by urbane and witty turns of phrase that Prentice would have  thought to be miles over their heads. Hooking his thumbs in his cartridge belt, courteously  turning from one section of his audience to another as his glasses gleamed in the  lights, he was using words like \"ludicrous\" and \"corruptible\" with the dark sweat  of the day's bayonet drill still staining his back: he was proving that you didn't  have to be a lout to be a soldier.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When he finished and sat down, there was a spatter  of applause.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Yes,\" the lieutenant said. \"Thank you. I think that was very well  put. Are there any other questions?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That was all, but it was enough to give Prentice  a sharp new focus for his yearnings. He knew what he wanted in the Army now. The  hell with this childish nonsense of being \"liked\" or \"disliked,\" of being \"accepted\"  or not. All he wanted now, beyond a certain basic competence, was to be as intelligent  and articulate as Quint, as independent as Quint, as aloof from the Army's indignities  as Quint. He very nearly wanted to be Quint, and at the very least he wanted to get  to know him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But the fool of the platoon could hardly buddy up with its one and  only intellectual—not, at least, right off the bat. It was a thing that would have  to be pursued very cautiously, and with no visible effort at pursuit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It began that  very evening, when he strolled over to Quint's bunk for a desultory chat and was  careful to walk away again before there could be any hint of his imposing. Several  nights later he saw Quint reading in the library but thought better of going over  to start another conversation, though he was careful to display the title of the  rather highbrow book he was carrying, in case Quint happened to look up as he passed  by on his way to the charge-out desk. Then, luckily, the company began its week of  training on the rifle range, marching out there before dawn each morning for a nine-hour  session with the targets, and this routine left long conversational openings in the  middle of the working day. There were whole half-hours with nothing to do but sit  around and wait for your turn on the firing line, and there was even more leisure  during the noon meal, which was served in mess kits from a mobile field kitchen.  Prentice made the most of those chances; it wasn't long before he and Quint were  pairing off at each break, almost as a matter of course. Then when the company went  out on bivouac they pitched their shelter halves together and shared the cramped,  wet, two-man discomfort of a pup tent in which they both developed chest colds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e By now they had grown as close as members of the same unhappy family, but Prentice  knew they couldn't yet be accurately described as friends, let alone as \"buddies.\"  They didn't even look right together: Prentice was at least nine inches too tall,  with a small, large-eyed face still nakedly eager for approval; Quint was solid and  settled in chronic exasperation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As they trudged side by side in a column of twos  for the five-mile march back to the barracks, under full field packs, Prentice was  determined not to open any conversation. If they were going to talk at all, Quint  would have to start it; and at least two and a half miles of silence went by before  Quint said, \"Cherrystone clams.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"What?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Just thinking about a meal I had once  in San Francisco.\" Quint winced in tiredness as he eased his rifle sling into a more  comfortable place on his shoulder. \"Best damn restaurant I've ever been to in my  life, only I can't remember the name of it. You ever have cherrystone clams? On the  half shell?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And soon they were engaged in what promised to be a long, wistful discussion  of the ultimate and perfect dinner, a dinner presumably to be shared some day after  the war in the best damn restaurant in the world. It would begin with cherrystone  clams and proceed to a celebrated kind of soup that only Quint had ever tasted.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Okay,\" Prentice said, \"and then what? A big steak, I guess, or a big piece of roast  beef with—\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"No. Hold on a second, Prentice; don't let's bolt the whole meal at  once. You're forgetting all about the fish course.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Okay.\" And as they debated  possibilities for the fish course it was all Prentice could do to keep his voice  from rising and giggling in pleasure like a girl's.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Then we're agreed on fillet  of sole, right?\" Quint said. \"All right, now it's time for the main dish. And listen,  don't let's be too hasty about the steak or the roast beef—there's plenty of other  things. Let's think a minute.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Prentice thought a minute, and while thinking, he  allowed one of his worst military habits to repeat itself. His toe scraped the heel  of the man walking ahead of him, an ex-Engineer corporal named Connor whose heels,  as he often and loudly told everyone, had been stepped on by Prentice every God damned  time Prentice followed him in the marching order. And because Prentice had long since  learned that no kind of apology would work with Connor, he could only assume a grave  and self-protective look of idiocy when Connor turned around and said, \"God damn  it, Prentice, will you watch your feet?\" There followed a silence of ten or twelve  paces, while Prentice wondered how soon it would be all right to resume the talk  of the ideal dinner.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was Quint, gratifyingly, who broke the silence, \"Come to  think of it,\" he said, \"I guess you're right, Prentice. There isn't anything better  than a steak. Let's make it two filet mignons, then, medium rare. And what'll we  have on the side? French fries, I guess, but I mean what kind of vegetable? Or would  you rather skip the vegetable and have a salad?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Right. Let's do that. Let's just  have a big sal—\" and then, hating himself, he stepped on Connor's heel again. But  there was barely time for Connor to turn around and say, \"Prentice, will you watch  your fucking feet?\"—there was barely time for that before Prentice saw something  funny in the movements of the men ahead. Far up in front, where the captain was,  they had all hunched over and broken into a trot, and they seemed to be taking off  their helmets. Nearer, just ahead of Connor, some of them had stopped and buckled  over as if in pain; and then, before he could bring his mind into focus, something  small and indistinct fell into the dust at his feet and exploded with a soft little  noise—Pluff!—and his eyes and throat were attacked by fire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e He couldn't see and  he couldn't breathe. He crouched, both hands grabbing for his eyes as his rifle swung  clumsily loose at his elbow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Keep moving, men,\" somebody was calling. \"Keep moving...\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Stumbling and pushed heavily from behind, he lost his balance and fell on the road  and rolled, legs in the air—all this happened before the first clear thought occurred  to him: Tear gas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And it was an agonizingly long time after that, while he scrabbled  on all fours to retrieve his rolling helmet, before he thought of what to do about  it--before his right hand clawed at the canvas pouch that had ridden under his left  armpit for weeks, tore it open, and pulled out the wobbling rubber paraphernalia  of his gas mask.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301999661285,"sku":"NP9780307455956","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307455956.jpg?v=1767720809","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/a-special-providence-isbn-9780307455956","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}