Book review: ‘The Fates Will Find Their Way’ by Hannah Pittard

The sudden disappearance of a child is a specific sort of horror. Its effects reverberate through families and communities with unforeseen consequence. The aftereffects last for decades.

It’s this sort of tragedy that is the centerpiece of “The Fates Will Find Their Way,” an emotionally taut and elegantly written novel about the disappearance of 16-year-old Nora Lindell. Inspired by the real-life experience of author Hannah Pittard, whose middle-school classmate lost a sister to a kidnapping, “Fates” plays with the ambiguity of such a scenario — chronicling the impact of a young girl who goes missing and is never found.

The book opens with the discovery that Nora is gone. It is the day after Halloween in a close-knit town where the information is met with disbelief, then speculation.

Was she kidnapped and murdered? Or was she pregnant, prompting her to run away to Arizona and get married? Is it possible, even, that she fled the country and moved to Mumbai? “Fates” presents multiple scenarios to explain Nora’s disappearance, but it stops short of definitively resolving the mystery.

This what-if form of storytelling is intriguing. Pittard follows each potential story line as if it were reality. But it is not. Each possible outcome is merely theory, put into circulation by the neighborhood boys who knew her and from whose perspective the story is told.

“Fates” is written from the collective viewpoint of six boys. One is a pedophile, another a drug addict — characters who may or may not have been involved with Nora’s disappearance and whose negative attributes reveal themselves only over time.

“Fates” spans decades, but the book is not presented in chronological order. Pittard has penned short stories for the literary magazines McSweeney’s and the Oxford American, and it shows with her novel-length debut. It is pieced together in vignettes, which, as a whole, hang together, showing the changing perspective of the boys and their theories of what happened to Nora as they transition into men.

In the novel’s beginning, these sex-obsessed adolescents are “creeps,” Pittard writes, “which means we were indiscreet and couldn’t help ourselves when it came time to trade what we’d done or not done or when and with whom and how.” Over the course of the book, they evolve into adults with wives and young children, who, despite their advancing age, continue to think of Nora and what might have been if she were still around.

Nora may be missing, but her presence looms large as an object of thwarted desire. She is a spectral figure whose absence shapes their lives more than it may have were she there.

By turns, “Fates” is a mystery and a coming of age story, chock-full of sexual innuendo and misconduct that includes rape and possible murder. Although there is a lot of unseemly action in “Fates,” there is very little dialogue. Pittard prefers to let her narrators ruminate, allowing her readers to form their own conclusions about what may have happened and why.

If there’s one takeaway message to the elegant, if unusual, “Fates,” it’s that life is messy and doesn’t get any less so with time.

susan.carpenter@latimes.com