Amber Alert

Hannah Pittard's The Fates Will Find Their Way and Sarah Braunstein's The Sweet Relief of Missing Children

by Justin Bauer

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Published: Mar 2, 2011

In HANNAH PITTARD's The Fates Will Find Their Way (Ecco, Jan. 25), we meet adolescent Trey Stephens, who, in 25 years' time, ends up in jail for seducing an old friend's underage daughter. In The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (Norton, Feb. 28), Sarah Braunstein introduces us to a peeping tom, then an adoptive mother guiltily aroused by her teenage son's erection, then an obedient 12-year-old who can't stop talking to strangers. The difference between these books, at least when it comes to the damaged and the unsavory, is of extent rather than kind.

After all, both hinge on children who go missing. For Pittard, it's Nora Lindell, a red-haired, golden-skinned high school junior who disappears on Halloween. For Braunstein, it seems like half her cast acts out a cascading multigenerational procession of recurring runaways and kidnappings, each one its own variation on themes of flight, abandonment and theft. Despite this obvious kinship, these two debut novels diverge almost completely in how they build themselves around an absent, vanished center.

Pittard's striking beginning — she opens by sending word of Nora's disappearance via a neighborhood phone tree — comes less from the situation than from the voice she delivers it in: an abstracted, omniscient first-person plural, a "we" that represents the collective of Nora's male classmates. It's distancing, mildly creepy, thoroughly voyeuristic — and as the obsessive "we" telling the story begins to speculate about what actually happened to Nora, whether she left or disappeared, Pittard uses that pronoun to implicate her readers in that speculation, that uncertainty.

For Braunstein, the loss of a child is obviously terrifying but also immediately liberating. (One runaway daughter's mother thinks, against her will, that "the last 16 years had been a figment, and this was her real life, alone, hers and Hank's, that she'd gone through with the abortion.") It's also played out against the backdrop of an indifferent world: Another mother, approached by a stranger, is on the attack. "Damn the Church. Damn the helpers. ... They want to be assured their own girls don't get stolen. It's an insurance policy, their help. Damn them all, every one of them, and damn you too."

The adolescent male collective of Fates, on the other hand, never approaches such an emotional temperature. Without the specificity of individual injury, these (mostly) nice suburban boys understand that they don't have a right to it, that such fierce claims are reserved for those who do more than stand by and watch and speculate.

As time goes on without any resolution, those (mostly) nice suburban boys do their best to fill up the emptiness of Nora's disappearance. They court her younger sister, and then they ostracize her; they embellish each others' eyewitness testimonies, and then they daydream and speculate competing alternative histories for Nora. By the end of the book, adolescent curiosity has hardened into a collective adult fixation, commandeering Nora's story as "something that was ours alone, and always had been," because they "had earned our fantasies about Nora Lindell; we had kept her legacy alive." Contrasting sharply with the Vaseline-lensed soft focus of Pittard's "we," the solidity of Braunstein's prose grounds her story. Her images emerge muscular and marbled, focused and rich. A 7-year-old, "fascinated still by sewer sludge and bottle caps, by the faces in kneecaps," gets lost on his first trip to the big city; a young wife, convinced she's unworthy of her husband and daughter, imagines her "faith and fidelity like apple seeds she'd swallowed by accident, in her but not of her, working their way out." These images aggregate into sharply individualized characters, each one clearer than any of the boys in Fates, who only bear names and capsule histories.

The sharp specificity of Braunstein's characters works best in short sections, before overwhelming the senses like over-patterned wallpaper. The difference is between the large scale and the small; but, even more than that, the difference between books as surface-similar as these is one of ambition against execution.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

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