Yates is no sentimentalist, and anyone who liked Revolutionary Road will not be expecting a laugh riot, but even so The Easter Parade is remarkably cruel and bleak. He puts his cards on the table in the opening sentence: "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life..." and the following 220 pages pore over their unhappiness in forensic detail. If this was on TV it would be called When Lives Collapse! or possibly just Endurance.

The sisters are Sarah and Emily Grimes (note Dickensian naming: grim, grime). Their parents divorce and they live with their mother, who likes them to call her Pookie. Their father has a great job in a great newspaper - or so they think, until he tells them how he's really nothing more than a low-status hack. And then dies. Sarah gets married to a grunt called Tony and quickly gets a few kids under her belt. Emily meanwhile, who is really the centre of the book, goes through a string of unsuitable relationships, all of which end badly when he leaves her (because he's impotent) or she leaves him (because he's a bore) or he leaves her (because he's bisexual and wants to explore other avenues, so to speak) or she leaves him, and so on... Meanwhile Tony is beating Sarah about, and the one time that she rings Emily wanting to leave him and move in with her, Emily puts her off because for once she's in a good relationship and doesn't want her sister cramping her brief happiness. Which doesn't last anyway, of course.

Ultimately hardly anyone gets out of the book alive, and I'm not sure if there is a tiny chink of light at the end or if I just imagined it, desperate for relief. I kept reading partly because it's brilliantly written and partly out of morbid curiosity to see what Yates would do to his little laboratory mice next. And it's not only the things that happen to the characters that is cruel, but also Yates's obvious contempt for them.

So it's hard to know what the message is in The Easter Parade (perhaps Yates would have balked at the suggestion, as Douglas Adams did: "No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book"): that life is hard and then you die? That whatever you throw at them, people will keep coming back for more? That, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, the majority of lives simply aren't worth living? The only thing it told me for sure is that yes, there is a book out there that makes Revolutionary Road look like Hi-de-Hi. (You know: the bit in chapter 4 where Frank Wheeler won the knobbly knees contest.)