The Fates Will Find Their Way: A Novel by Hannah Pittard (New York: Ecco Publishing, 2011. 256 pp)
Hannah Pittard’s fiction has appeared
in McSweeney’s, the Oxford American, the Mississippi Review, BOMB, Nimrod, and StoryQuarterly, and was included in 2008 Best American
Short Stories’ 100 Distinguished Stories. She is the recipient of the 2006
Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award and has taught fiction at the University of DePaul and the University of Virginia, where she was also a Henry Hoyns Fellow.
Telephone!
It begins as
early as preschool with children congregating in a circle. The teacher kneels
and whispers information to a girl urging her to motion it onward to her
neighbor’s ear. As the children intake, comprehend, and transfer information,
the meaning quickly loses significance. Upon revealing the information at the
final child, the group chuckles at the distance between the final conclusions
and the teacher’s original message. The game of telephone teaches us the ease
by which information disintegrates.
Beginning with a
group of parents activating the telephone chain, Hannah Pittard introduces her
novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way
with a clear reference to the misinformation of gossip.
The Void of Life
Set in an unspecified
suburb, The Fates Will Find Their Way
depicts a group of male friends and the lives they lead in the wake of the
disappearance of Nora Lindell, a fellow classmate. With time providing the
chill of the cold case files, the group of boys must fill in the blanks in
their collective psyche.
Did Nora jump in
a stranger’s car never to be seen again like the awful scenarios exhibited
often in the movies? Pondering the scenario, the boys think,
“They drove away together. It was an adventure, perhaps. But the experience that Nora had no doubt hoped would be intriguing turned quickly into something more menacing than mysterious. Almost immediately after she got in, she probably wanted to get out. It’s the stuff of fantasies, not of real life. In fantasies, you can get into strangers’ cars” (15).
Maybe Nora’s
bones are buried in river sediment two counties down.
Leaving on a Jet Plane
Did Nora run away
buying a plane ticket to a warm location? As the boys grow up and get married,
they still meet and discuss the possibilities,
“We liked to imagine that she’d picked Arizona for the Grand Canyon and the warmth. Maybe she’d though it was possible to live in it, in the canyon. But she never admitted that to anyone, not once she got there and saw how wrong her fantasy had been” (69).
As the group of
boys transitions to men with wives, children, and real jobs, the obsession with
the disappearance of a teenage girl shifts into slightly creepy territory.
“Like our mothers, our wives were troubled by our refusal to let Nora Lindell go. They thought, perhaps rightly, that it was an indulgence from which only jealousy and regret could come” (191).
The Fates Got Lost on the Way
 |
| Photo by Grant Hutchinson |
Even though she
mentions specific names of these boys, no protagonist steps forward. In turn,
the reader is left with understanding the boys as the protagonist. Sadly, this
step left me indifferent to the plight of these characters. Without much
connection to any of them, let alone a clear link to why they valued Nora, the
narrative frustrated me.
This realization,
coupled with the suspension of belief around boys and gossip, left me
unimpressed with this novel.
In the end, I
found The Fates Will Find Their Way a
quick read about gossip and what it means when a group transforms an
unexplained event into a fantastical life story. Artistically, I understand
where Pittard is going with the novel, but I didn’t enjoy it. Yes, humanity
tends to mold information into an understandable box in our mind. No, I do not
recommend this book.
No comments:
Post a Comment