Robert Prentice is eighteen & his boyhood dreams have disintegrated on the battlefields of Europe. At home his mother Alice wraps herself in fantasy against the relentless disappointments of life. From his compelling portraits of these two damaged souls Richard Yates creates a brilliant novel of post-war America at odds with its own identity striving to combine prosperity & ideals mercilessly exposed in the attempt to do so. At once tender & ironic bitterly sad & achingly funny A Special Providence" is the second novel by the author of " Revolutionary Road"."