Book Review: New in Print

The Fates Will Find Their Way

by Hannah Pittard
Ecco, 256 pp., $22.99

This is a story of what could have been.

Hannah Pittard's first novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way, borrows its title from Virgil's Aeneid, but the epic journey one would expect from such an allusion takes place entirely in the minds of a group of boys – now men, if by age only – who grew up together in a small town in the Mid-Atlantic. Nora Lindell, in their collective first-person perspective, is quite literally the one who got away; she disappeared at 16 on Halloween, and the boys spend the next few decades piecing together photographs, airport sightings, and the apparently obligatory lesbian fantasy to try to figure out where she wound up, with whom, and how.

Denizens of small towns will understand their motivation, this underlying need to know, as well as the narrators' tendency to slip in small details of others' lives as if they're understood already. They have no more than "innuendoes and guesses, half-true stories and gossip" at their disposal, but nothing holds attention like gossip, and this reader found herself plowing through the pages, despite sensing that no answer would come. The short chapters, each a tiny snapshot, offer perfectly sized glimpses into the mystery, and the past and conditional tenses are used rather interchangeably, artfully blurring the line between actual events that transpired and the Choose Your Own Adventure-style chapters the young men have concocted.

The trouble – aside from a few minor editing errors and the fact that on at least one copy of this book the text on the binding was printed upside down – is that the first-person plural perspective is at best overwhelming and at worst stifling of the stories of the individual boys, whose characters are drowned out in a cacophony of voices by another half-dozen as soon as they begin to solo.

That aside, the writing is crisp and clean, with thoughtful details and a fanciful plot. But as the cover (if not case) is closed, thoughts may drift to Rian Johnson's similarly themed Brick, and while some readers may prefer this small-town, drug-free protraction, this one at least wished for a bit more edge than these deckle-edged pages had to offer.