Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way
Featured Book
A Eugenides-esque debut charting suburbia and prolonged adolescences
Hannah Pittard’s startling first novel takes one of the most abused forms in all of literature — the “we” narrator — and uses it to craft an elegiac, emotional story about growing up. With notable similarities to Jeffrey Eugenides’s career-launching Virgin Suicides, The Fates Will Find Their Way starts with certainties — Nora Lindell went missing on Halloween — and branches into the much more opaque territories, full of “what-ifs” and “what-might-haves.” Narrated by a group of boys in small-town America, the book uses Nora’s disappearance to let the boys tell their own story of becoming men. As they concoct theories about her fate, their own stories emerge, shifting smoothly between past, present and future. Pittard develops a composite picture of a group of young men on the cusp of adulthood, ably spreading her narrative out over almost a dozen well-drawn characters. Interestingly, as her “we” narrator interrogates the various boys in Nora’s community, The Fates Will Find Their Way develops a compelling take on that most American of landscapes — the suburbs — offering both nostalgia for their safety and simplicity and a warning of their falseness. In its arresting, sometimes purposely unbelievable testimony, it’s a book to send you back to your own adolescence, recalled and seen differently for the experiences of Pittard’s lost boys.
