Title: The Fates Will Find Their Way
Author: Hannah Pittard
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Ecco | HarperCollins
Pub Date: Jan 2011
Read: Jan 2011
Purchased: WORD Brooklyn
Why: I was looking for titles coming out in 2011, and I stumbled on this one (possibly on Amazon?) It seemed interesting so I added it to my Book Wish List.
Fulfills Challenge? Yes.
Notes: Just realized that I actually ended up buying this on the same day it came out.
Review/Thoughts:
The following review is spoilerish. Spoilerish because I don’t think the outcome matters so much. What Pittard does is truly remarkable and I am going to say, for those who are not comfortable with spoilerish reviews, just go out and read the damn book! And then come back so we can discuss :) (also, for a less spoilerish review, check out Emily St John Mandell’s review on The Millions)
Told in multiple-first person perspective (we), Hannah Pittard’s The Fates Will Find Their Way naturally invites comparison to Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, and I don’t think that comparison is unwarranted. Both deal with the theme of loss and speculation, but whereas The Virgin Suicides primarily deals with the time leading up to the girls’ suicides in the boys’ attempt to understand why they killed themselves, The Fates Will Find Their Way deals largely with what may have happened to the missing girl, Nora Lindell.
Immediately the difference between these two works is clear: death, as horrible as it is, is the strongest kind of closure there is. When a person goes missing, it is often more difficult for the family and friends because there is no closure, and hope lingers even when it shouldn’t. Achieving a sense of peace and acceptance is more difficult. It undermines an individual’s sense of certainty.
As if the realization that there’s so much that we didn’t — that we don’t — know that it’s frightening, that it’s distancing and isolating and sad.1
The significance of the line, the weight of it, is undeniable. The bitter hopelessness, the terrifying nature of uncertainty, the realization that you never really can know another person and that we’re all alone because of it.
What we don’t get a lot of in this novel is Nora Lindell as she was. We see the narrators as they were and as they are now. But what becomes increasingly clear is that the boys didn’t really know Nora all that well.
And she told the truth quietly, a whisper that not even we could hear.
Is this simply a reference to the fact that they don’t know what really happened to her, therefore the truth is concealed from them? or does it also refer to the fact that they never really knew Nora when she was around. Perhaps they regret this, perhaps this is one reason they feel such a need to weave stories about what may have happened to her. It not only keeps her (and hope) alive but assuages some of their guilt for not knowing her, for not noticing, and therefore for not being able to prevent her disappearance. To continue her story is an act of kindness, to her (and I believe also to themselves).
The entire novel is an act of storytelling. What is a novel (a short story, a novella) but a prolonged act of answering the question, What if…? Sometimes the writer creates that question from scratch, sometimes they borrow from real life to create the scenario, but all stories attempt to answer that question.
This is what is both fascinating and frustrating about this novel. We never get a single answer, but multiple answers. Like Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths, one road forks into two, and then two more, ad infinitum. And these are just the paths these boys, now men, consider. There are so many other possible explanations they don’t even touch upon. They even admit to their imaginations being limited (“it was all we could imagine”), that they prefer their own versions to the truth because they were incapable of imagining the truth on their own.
The construction of the narrative is non-linear. We often see their speculation before seeing the evidence of what led them to come to this conclusion in the first place. The novel moves back and forth between adolescence and adulthood and even that back and forth motion isn’t linear. We might go back to when the boys were 15, then move forward to when they’re 40, then move back to when they were 13, then forward again into their 20s, etc. For a long time, it is not even clear how old they are, when the present actually is. There are many presents, defined only by their not being teenagers anymore. And their preoccupation with Nora makes even the past feel like the present, as if they haven’t really moved forward. Even in their imaginings of her, Nora’s behavior is very child-like (“She would always be a child. How could she ever be anything more than a child to us?”) because of course, that is all they know of her (and know is a strong word here). What they know of Nora is nothing more than a bunch of still frames in their minds, quick snapshots of her leaning up against something or the length of her skirt or the way she looked on a particular day in autumn. Nothing substantial. Nothing that can really tell us what probably happened to her.
These haunting lines struck me as the truest words in the book, and maybe some of the saddest:
And suddenly, something new is now certain, something that we hadn’t ever thought before. There will come a day when we will think of Nora Lindell for the last time…Whatever the memory, we will think of her, wonder what might have been, and we won’t even know it while it’s happening, but it will be the last time we ever think of her.
There’s so much going on in this novel that can be easily overlooked because it is actually a quick, engaging read. But do yourself a favor, go back and re-read some parts, stop and take notes. Really think about the structure of the novel and the way in which Pittard builds the story. You’ll get a lot more out of it if you do.
Final Verdict: 
1. I didn’t notice it when I first read it but I am noticing it now, the sentence/fragment is kind of awkward isn’t it? Oh well, I followed up with an awkward fragment of my own!
I saw you gave this one a 5 on goodreads so I was interested to see a full review. That last line you quoted is really going to stick with me. Trying to think of a lot of people at once as I type this.