As Hamlet never said, "Maybe or not maybe? That is the question." In Hannah Pittard's THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY, it's also the answer -- the word "maybe," I mean, which is ubiquitous throughout the narrative. Predicated on the disappearance of 16-year-old Nora Lindell, the short novel explores its impact on a collection of local boys who think, "Maybe this happened to Nora," and, "Maybe THAT happened to Nora." This, in short, is the novel's conceit. Each chapter plays out a possible narrative for poor Nora, some leading to her getting in a Catalina with a stranger, some seeing her out west with a doting Mexican man, one landing her in Mumbai, India, with a female lover, and some speculating on her early and violent demise. No one knows, but everyone has a theory, and every boy cherishes and shares his own, constantly revising and enhancing it as age overtakes him and his buddies. Who knows? "Maybe" one of them is true.
The book's opening words ("Some things were certain; they were undeniable, inarguable. Nora Lindell was gone, for one thing. There was no doubt about that.") are reminiscent of Charles Dickens' opening to A CHRISTMAS CAROL ("Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.") And, indeed, Nora's presence haunts proceedings as ably as Dickens' Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. This isn't a morality tale, however. It is very modern literary fiction and, as such, will attract fans of that genre, perhaps some familiar with Pittard's award-winning short stories. There's no question but the writing is fine in a minimalist way. Here, for instance, we see Nora stepping out of the car owned by an unidentified male who has lured her to his Catalina and driven her into the woods:
"She tried walking backwards, squinting to focus through the cold, afraid to lose sight of the car and its contents. The exhaust was milky and pink in the brake lights. The headlights gave out a glow maybe twenty, thirty feet in front of the car, illuminating a triangle of dead leaves that faded completely at the root of a large elm. The smaller the car got, the faster she moved."
Some readers will be put off by the unusual point of view: the first-person plural. Thus, you get lines like, "We'd seen her making phone calls in the telephone booth outside the liquor store, inside the train station, behind the dollar store," and "Our mothers tried, but we were the ones who really could imagine it. We were the ones who could picture those twins as if they were ours." No one boy transcends another. All but one attend a private school in a mid-Atlantic state, and all have their quirks, hopes, dreams, and weaknesses. Still, they never become fully developed due to the diluting "we" factor. Instead, Pittard wants to develop the myth-making prowess of these boys, these dorky, starry-eyed teenagers who hold tight to an unsolvable mystery that has become integral to their shared coming-of-age.
As plots go, there's not a lot of impetus. Rather, Pittard's is an artistic piece working in waves that keep coming at you -- not unlike Bach's music -- with variations on a theme. While technically well done, some of the scenarios imagined by "boys plural" look more like the work of a "woman singular" mind due to the delicacy and the detail, which are often a clumsy match with the sophomoric antics of the adolescent males depicted. In fact, Pittard's hand is stronger at capturing this -- the real-life badinage and the culture of put-downs that express "love" between boyhood friends. When it comes to their various imaginings of Nora's subsequent lives, however, the book becomes less convincing.
So much depends upon the reader. I know some will embrace this as a small gem of disproportionate brightness. Others, like me, might find it intriguing, but flawed. Focus on the review and not the star rating, then; it's merely a compromise based on a reading with highlights and drawbacks, either of which might be seen more, less, or not at all by you.
