The Fates Will Find Their Way

Nora Lindell, a teenager girl, goes missing from a small East Coast town. The mystery of her disappearance isn't solved. This premise, while interesting, is by no means new or unusual, unless written by Hannah Pittard. Pittard takes this concept and spins it on its ear in The Fates Will Find Their Way by choosing a group of boys to narrate the story. A story about the power of common myth while growing up and growing older.

It has been a long time since I've been possessed to stop reading, scour the house for a writing utensil and start underlying and marking up the book. The Fates Will Find Their Way made me do just that. I couldn't not mark it up. Pittard's writing is gorgeous and consuming. Here are a couple of examples from my show more favorite passages:

The Mexican loved them all. It was from him that the girls would learn about love. Not that there wasn't a tenderness to Nora. There was. A great deal of tenderness, but it was the tenderness of a hospice nurse-of one committed to caring but too familiar with pain and parting to ever truly or fully invest.

_______

If only we'd known. But we didn't know. We never know. No matter how many times we revisit that party or any other. The fact is, until it happened, until Trey changed how we viewed him, how we viewed and view ourselves-as men, as fathers, as friends and husbands-we could never know enough to change the outcome. Not his. Not ours. Certain outcomes are unavoidable, invariable, absolutely unaffectable, and yet completely unpredictable. Certain outcomes are that way.

There is so much I'd love to say about this book. I would love the opportunity to discuss it with other people. However, for the sake if those who've not read it, I can't. Any detail, no matter how small, feels like a spoiler. Something known about the novel ahead of time would spoil the joy of discovering it on one's own.

By the time I finished The Fates Will Find Their Way, I was in love with Hannah Pittard's writing and storytelling. I don't know how else to describe the experience than to say that I set the book down in the end with complete satisfaction. I thanked my lucky stars for requesting it. It was a pure delight. show less

I originally passed on The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard, because the summary said it was about a girl who went missing and the effect on those close to her. Then I saw that Indiespensable chose it as their current installment, so I had to read it. I’m glad I did. This book is about so much more than a missing girl. It is about a group of people who share a defining moment in their lives. More importantly, it’s about what they do with that moment. Like all good literature, it is about us.

The book opens with a statement of facts:

"Some things were certain; they were undeniable, inarguable. Nora Lindell was gone, for one thing. There was no doubt about that. For another, it was Halloween when she went missing, which only show more served to compound the eeriness, the mysteriousness of her disappearance."

Those facts are the defining moment shared by the group of neighborhood boys who went to school with Nora- the collective “we” that narrates the book. Those opening sentences set the stage for the fantasies and conjecture that make up much of the rest of the book and the rest of the boys’ lives.

First and foremost, Hannah Pittard is a superb writer technically. As mentioned, the book is written in the collective “we,” which is no easy task to believably sustain. Though the book revolves around Nora Lindell’s disappearance, it does not progress in the usual mystery genre fashion. It is not organized chronologically, and a solution to the mystery (in a traditional sense) does not steadily evolve. Yet, Pittard perfectly crafts every sentence and scene to manage the pace and keep the reader going.

As the book progresses, the boys, who are later middle-aged men, construct possible scenarios to explain Nora’s disappearance based on snippets of details gathered from various sources over the years. The reliability of many of the sources is questionable, but that’s not the point. The point is the boys have a remarkable event in their youth that is open to interpretation and full of possibilities. They share it. They are in control of it. They always return to it.

The boys’ personal lives develop around the collective obsession over what happened to Nora. The reader learns how events surrounding Nora’s disappearance have supposedly affected the boys’ individual lives as they grow older. I say “supposedly” because the boys make the connection to Nora when explaining the unfortunate events surrounding their individual lives. One has sex with another’s 14-year-old daughter. One has an adulterous affair. One becomes obsessed with Nora’s younger sister, and so on. But are the boys reliable narrators? Isn’t their judgment skewed by their obsession? After all, people do these kinds of things all the time without ever knowing a girl who went missing. In fact, the truth is the collective is not really likable, and yet, the reader can’t help but empathize with them.

Nora’s disappearance becomes more than just a passing fantasy to the collective. It becomes something they use to give their lives meaning and purpose. And don’t we all go to some event in our youth, in our past, some decision, and imagine, “what if?” And whether we realize it or not, we partially judge ourselves and where we are by those passing fantasies. I don’t want to go into the boys’ individual stories in detail because I’m afraid it will give away too much. The careful unfolding of their lives around the core of the disappearance is partly what gives the book pace. But the collective narrator ponders the events, not just those regarding Nora but their own lives, during funerals, at dinner parties, even at the grill in the backyard:

"Often it would take a wife’s hand on the shoulder to pull us away from these reveries. “Honey,” she might say, “the coals. Are they ready? The kids are hungry.” And they would always be tender at these moments, always impossibly understanding, as though they could see our thoughts, read our fears, our worries. Sometimes, it’s like they almost understand how incredibly overwhelming it all is—to be a man, to be a father, a husband, a human being, responsible for the lives of others."

And of course, after learning about our collective narrator, we are to read the satire in that statement. The book is full of dark humor, and I will use that as a segue to how I connect it to Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, a personal favorite. Cat’s Cradle is also full of dark humor, but more importantly to this book, one of themes in Cat’s Cradle is how people often believe in the fantasies (lies by any other name) they construct themselves.

In Cat’s Cradle, the people on the island of San Lorenzo have created their own elaborate religion and hero. The people on the island know it is all made up. It is all lies, but they believe it and practice it anyway. When I taught the book, my students often asked, “Why do they believe it if they know it is a lie? That’s stupid.” They believe it because the lie gives them purpose. It makes their mundane lives bearable. It is escape.

In The Fates Will Find Their Way, a reporter believes she has stumbled upon an explanation to the mystery behind Nora’s disappearance, but she needs assistance from Nora’s family. The collective boys, men at this point in the book, do not want the family to give the reporter what she needs. They do not want the reporter to solve the mystery. Why? They have wondered what happened all these years. Ultimately, they do not want it to end. They do not want the truth, because then they would no longer own the fantasy. They would only have the reality around them.

I imagine The Fates Will Find Their Way will find it’s way to many “best of” lists this year. It is published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins publishers. show less

I liked this quite a bit more than I expected to. Strong writing, strong voice. Reminiscent of The Virgin Suicides and Then We Came to the End, of course, due to the perspective, but I think it holds its own well even in comparison to those very good books.

t was Halloween night when 16-year-old Nora Liddell went missing. Last seen (perhaps) getting into a beat-up Catalina near the bus station, Nora vanished from her upper-middle-class suburb, never to be heard from again. But in Hannah Pittard’s debut novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way, her absence renders her present in a way her presence never could have.

This novel takes readers into the shared mind of Nora’s former community, specifically the mind of the boys around her age. Using first-person plural narration, Pittard creates a group consciousness in which each member of the group is both observing and being observed. It’s a technique that could easily seem gimmicky, but I found it surprisingly effective.

The book moves back show more and forth in time, as the boys (and later the men) reflect on the past and note how the present colors their views. There’s a sense that past, present, and future are connected, each one speaking to the other. This lack of a linear story, however, does not make the book any less absorbing; I was riveted almost from the start. There’s a wonderfully compelling quality to Pittard’s prose that made it difficult to put this book down. I wanted to read on, not because I needed to know what would happen next, but because I was interested in the characters’ emotional journeys.

Every few chapters, the book leaves the community of boys to imagine a handful of possible futures for Nora. As the boys learn more of Nora’s last weeks with them and as they get tantalizing glimpses of a woman with Nora’s red hair, they build a whole other life for Nora—and perhaps a dream for themselves. Somehow, Nora got away; these boys have not. It’s striking (and perhaps a little too convenient) that they all stayed in this little community.

Although the mystery of Nora’s disappearance looms large in the lives of the boys, it’s not really the central mystery of the book. Her story, even if it’s complete fantasy, is the clearest one in the novel. A bigger mystery is how we become who we become. But the even bigger mystery is the mystery we are to each other. This is where Pittard’s seemingly self-consciously experimental choice of the third-person point of view really pays off. Although in some respects the boys think as a single unit, as individuals they are unknown to the others. The we telling the story isn’t a single we at all—yet the narrative we still has a voice, the voice of the community. All stand apart from the others, but all are part of the others. The interplay is fascinating. This is definitely a case of a stylistic oddity serving its story well.

See my complete review at Shelf Love. show less

The central figure in this book, 16 year old Nora Liddell, never actually appears other than in the memories and speculations of the boys who were her friends. As they grow up and marry and have children of their own, they are always haunted by the memory of perfect Nora- she looms large over their psyches despite her long absence. As they debate whether or not she ran away or was abducted, whether she hopped a plane to AZ or was buried in a shallow grave it the woods, some part of them is always stuck in childhood in that focus on Nora and her family.

This is a wonderfully written book- truly original and an excellent read. Though at the beginning, I kept hoping to get some clarity on what actually happened to Nora, by the end it was show more clear that knowledge was unnecessary. Though Nora and her sister are in many ways the central chracters in this drama, it is the reactions of the boys around them that are the focus of this engaging novel. Highly recommended! show less

The fates will find a way by Hannah Pittard is mostly about the aftermath of a small community after a young girl Nora simply vanishes. Told in what's being called `percussive voice", the author forces you into the perspectives of a group of boys who come of age while becoming more and more obsessed with the mystery.

The most striking thing about this short novel is how different it is then any other that you are likely to pick up. More than half the novel is comprised of imaginary scenarios about what could have happened to Nora. It's a lot of "maybe's" and "let's say". Even though certain elements of these stories come to fruition, most of it is narrative guess work. And we are never given a definitive answer about what happened to show more this girl. If Pittard had taken a stand in one way or another, this technique may have been more effective. As it's written, I have a hard time reconciling what happened because not much actually did. Although some will enjoy sleuthing through the possibilities, the lack of answers will frustrate others. show less

Hannah Pittard assembles a chorus of prep school boys to narrate this tale of teenage sexuality and neighborhood secrets. One Halloween night, popular girl Nora disappears after (maybe) getting into a stranger's car. The boys' vivid imaginations conjure up a variety of possible fates for her. Meanwhile they're all fascinated by Nora's little sister Sissy, who has a subplot of her own. It is an interesting literary experiment; I'm not sure it worked, however. The chorus technique, which is reminiscent of the group narration in William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily", distances the reader from the characters and their many renditions of Nora's fate. I found it hard to care about any of it.