Chances Are . . .

Starred review from May 15, 2019
A reunion on Martha's Vineyard reopens old mysteries and wounds for three Vietnam-era college friends. Russo's (The Destiny Thief, 2018, etc.) 14th book blends everything we love about this author with something new. Yes, this is a novel about male friendship, fathers and sons, small-town class issues, and lifelong crushes, and it provides the familiar pleasure of immersion in the author's distinctive, richly observed world and his inimitable ironic voice. But this is also a mystery about a 1971 cold case. At the center of it is one of Russo's impossibly magical women, one Jacy Rockafellow, who graduated Minerva College in Connecticut that year with three "hashers"--scholarship students who worked in the dining hall of her sorority and were also her closest friends. Mickey is the son of a West Haven construction worker, Teddy the offspring of Midwestern high school teachers, and Lincoln comes from Dunbar, Arizona, the only child of a tiny tyrant named Wolfgang Amadeus Moser--Dub Yay to his friends--and his downtrodden, docile wife, Trudy. Dub Yay announces that in order for Lincoln to go to college at a small East Coast liberal arts school, he, Dub Yay, would have to be dead. "A statement that was clearly designed to end this conversation, so Lincoln was surprised to see on his mother's face an unfamiliar expression that suggested she'd contemplated her husband's mortality with equanimity and was undeterred." Vintage Russo. All three boys are head over heels in love with Jacy, who is engaged to someone named Vance, Chance, or Lance, whom she seems to care about not a whit. Midway through their college years, the draft lottery occurs; one of the boys gets a very low number and is certain to be called up. A farewell weekend at Lincoln's mother's beach house on Martha's Vineyard turns out to be the last time Jacy is ever seen or heard of. When the three boys reunite there as 66-year-old men, they can't think of anything but her; cherchez la femme. No one understands men better than Russo, and no one is more eloquent in explaining how they think, suffer, and love. At a rough time for masculinity, Russo's flawed but always decent characters are repositories of the classic virtues of their gender.

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May 27, 2019
Russo’s first standalone novel in a decade (after Everybody’s Fool) mixes his signature themes—father-and-son relationships, unrequited love, New England small-town living, and the hiccups of aging—with stealthy clue-dropping in a slow-to-build mystery about a young woman’s 1971 disappearance. Set mostly in Martha’s Vineyard circa 2015 with flashbacks to the characters’ coming-of-age in the 1960s and ’70s, the story follows three college buddies who, now in their mid-60s, decide to reunite on the island. There’s Lincoln, a happily married and successful real estate broker with six kids; Teddy, an editor and publisher of a small university press who’s prone to panic attacks and disorienting spells that leave him depressed; and Mickey, a musician renowned for his ability to rock hard, play hard, and sometimes beat up anyone in his way. Then there’s the missing link—gorgeous Jacy, the “three musketeers’ ” closest gal pal from college and secret crush—who was engaged to “privileged, pre-school, Greenwich, Connecticut” Vance, and had joined her boys at Lincoln’s Vineyard cabin for one last hurrah before she vanished. Relayed in alternating chapters from mostly Lincoln and Teddy’s perspectives, the narrative touches on the Vietnam draft, Lincoln’s complicated relationship with his dogmatic father and meek mother, and an accident that befalls Teddy. In the final stretch, surprising, long-kept secrets are revealed. This is vintage Russo. (July)This review has been updated to remove a spoiler.

Starred review from June 1, 2019
Thrown together as kitchen-staff co-workers for the Theta sorority at Minerva College in 1971, Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey form a bond as strong as their namesake Three Musketeers. Part of what unites them is their affection for the comely, capricious Jacy Rockafellow. With graduation looming and Mickey destined to head to Vietnam, the four friends revel in a final weekend at Lincoln's family cottage on Martha's Vineyard. While they all hope to convince Mickey to flee to Canada, each musketeer privately schemes to induce Jacy to declare that she is in love with him and him alone. Instead, before the weekend is over, Jacy will have disappeared without a trace. Fast-forward 40 years, when the now senior-citizen Three Musketeers have reunited at the cottage for another last hurrah before Lincoln puts it up for sale. Ghosts of Jacy abound, leading Lincoln to delve into the mystery behind her presumed death. For his first stand-alone novel in 10 years, Russo has written a bewitching tale of male friendship with thriller elements, leading to a shift in tone and pacing that may startle his loyal readers. That Russo takes deep philosophical dives into issues of fate and free will, loyalty and lies in the subtlest ways will, however, surprise no one. This is vintage Russo with a cunning twist.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Russo's fans will be on the hunt, and his bend into suspense will attract new readers, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

August 30, 2019

Upright, uptight Lincoln, a commercial real estate broker with a tricky marriage; scholarly, reserved Teddy, a small-press publisher within a university and without much of a love life; and ebullient, six-foot-six Mickey, still playing rock at age 66, gather post-Labor Day at a beach house on Martha's Vineyard that Lincoln inherited from his mother. West Coaster Lincoln is thinking about selling the house, and this is a last chance to bind up loose ends and their frayed friendship. As they reminisce about their years together at a small liberal arts college in New England, where they all loved sparkling risk taker Jacy and nervously faced the draft for the Vietnam War, we learn more about what has happened to them since. In particular, we see how they mourn Jacy, who vanished decades ago on a graduation trip to the island, even as the narrative reconstructs her own fraught family story. The ongoing struggle to determine what happened to Jacy creates intriguing tension without imposing a mystery structure on the novel, and the result is neither a nostalgia trip nor a downbeat what-we've-lost complaint but a paean to life lived. VERDICT Pulitzer Prize winner Russo returns with a bittersweet tale of longtime friendship and lost love that has a surprising--and surprisingly satisfying--ending. [See Prepub Alert, 4/8/19.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 30, 2019

This just in from the Pulitzer Prize winner, whose newest novel was just pushed up to August. Upright, uptight Lincoln; scholarly, reserved Teddy; and ebullient, six-foot-six Mickey, still playing rock at age 66, all gather post-Labor Day at a beach house on Martha's Vineyard. They reminisce about their college years at a small liberal arts college in New England and the girl who got away--quite literally. She vanished decades ago on a graduation trip to the island. With a 200,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.