Chances are..

Richard Russo, 1949-

Large print - 2019

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Russo--in his first stand-alone novel in a decade--comes a new revelation: a gripping story about the abiding yet complex power of friendship. One beautiful September day, three sixty-six-year old men convene on Martha's Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties. They couldn't have been more different then, or even today--Lincoln's a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher, and Mickey a musician beyond his rockin' age. But each man holds his own secrets, in addition to the monumental mystery that none of them has ever stopped puzzling over since a Memorial Day weekend right here on the Vineyard in 1971. Now, more than forty years la...ter, as this new weekend unfolds, three lives and that of a significant other are displayed in their entirety while the distant past confounds the present like a relentless squall of surprise and discovery. Shot through with Russo's trademark comedy and humanity, Chances Are... also introduces a new level of suspense and menace that will quicken the reader's heartbeat throughout this absorbing saga of how friendship's bonds are every bit as constricting and rewarding as those of family or any other community. For both longtime fans and lucky newcomers, Chances Are... is a stunning demonstration of a highly acclaimed author deepening and expanding his remarkable achievement"-- Provided by publisher.

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Subjects
Genres
Thrillers (Fiction)
Novels
Published
[New York] : Random House Large Print [2019]
Language
English
Main Author
Richard Russo, 1949- (author)
Edition
First large print edition
Physical Description
445 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780593153666
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

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.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

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 MoserDub Yay to his friendsand 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Lincoln September was the best month on the island. The crowds were gone, the beaches empty, the ocean still warm. No need for restaurant reservations. After Labor Day, the politicians had all returned to D.C., the left-wing Hollywood/media types to L.A. and New York. Also gone were the smug, privileged frat boys, many of whom imagined themselves Democrats but who in the fullness of time would become mainstream Republicans. Half of Lincoln's Las Vegas agency--or what was left of it after the Great Recession--was made up of Sigma Chis who'd been long-haired pot smokers and war protesters in the sixties and seventies. Now they were hard-line conservatives, or anyway harder than Lincoln. These days, a lifelong Republican himself, Lincoln had a difficult time finding comfort anywhere on the political spectrum. Voting for Hillary was out of the question, but if not her, then who? A baker's dozen of GOP candidates were still in the race--some legitimately stupid, others acting like it--at least through Iowa. So Kasich, maybe. Bland wouldn't be so bad. Think Eisenhower. Anyway, a relief to shelve politics for a few days. Lincoln had little doubt that Teddy, who would arrive tomorrow, was still a raging lib, though there was no way of telling whether he'd be in the Clinton or the Sanders camp. Mickey? Did he even vote? Probably not a bad idea to give Vietnam a conversational miss, as well. The war had been over for decades, except not really, not for men of their age. It had been their war, whether or not they'd served. Though his memory was increasingly porous these days, Lincoln still remem­bered that evening back in 1969 when all the hashers had gathered in the back room of the Theta house to watch the draft lottery on a tiny black-and-white TV someone had brought in for the occasion. Had they asked permission to watch on the big TV in the front room? Probably not. The social boundaries of sororities, like so much else in the culture, had started eroding, as evidenced by their regular Friday afternoon hasher parties, but they could still crop up unexpectedly. Hashers still entered the house through the rear. Anyway, the draft wasn't about the Thetas, it was about Lincoln and Teddy and Mickey and the others. Eight young men whose fortunes that night hung in the balance. A couple were dating Thetas, as Lincoln would the following year with Anita, and planned to see them later in the evening, but they'd watch the lottery on the crappy little set in the back room, not the big color one in the front room, because they belonged there, as did the war itself. They'd made a party of it, everybody chipping in for a case of beer--strictly against the rules, but Cook wouldn't squeal, not that night. The rule was that you couldn't start drinking until your birthday had been drawn and you knew your fate. Mickey's came first, shockingly early. Number 9. How was it that Lincoln could recall this detail, when time had relegated so much else to memory's dustbin? He remembered, too, how his friend had risen to his feet, his arms raised like a victorious boxer, as if he'd been hoping for precisely this eventuality. Going over to the aluminum tub, he'd pulled a beer out of the ice, popped the top and chugged half of it. Then, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he'd grinned and said, "You boys must be feeling pretty dry in the mouth right about now." The other thing Lincoln recalled was glancing over at Teddy and seeing that all the blood had drained out of his face. Absent from these vivid memories, though, was how he'd com­ported himself. Had he joined the others in serenading Mickey with the Canadian national anthem? Had he laughed at the god-awful jokes ("Been nice knowin' ya, Mick")? He had a dim, perhaps false, memory of taking Mickey aside at some point and saying, "Hey, man, it's a long way off." Because even those who'd drawn low numbers probably wouldn't hear from their draft boards for months, and college students were allowed to finish that academic year. Most juniors in good standing--as Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey were--would get one-year deferments to complete their degrees before reporting for duty. Maybe by then the war would be over or, failing that, winding down. Later that evening Lincoln called home, hoping his mother would answer, though naturally it was his father who picked up. "We watched," he said, his nasal, high-pitched voice exaggerated by the tinny, long-distance connection. "Like I told your mother, they won't go beyond one-fifty." As with all his father's opinions, this one was expressed as fact. "Unless you're wrong and they do," Lincoln said, emboldened, perhaps, by being three thousand miles away. "But I'm not and they won't," Dub-Yay had assured him, prob­ably to allay Lincoln's fear, though he sometimes wondered if his father's pronouncements served some other, more obscure purpose. Ever since his mother let him in on the truth about their family finances, his father's declarations had begun to tick him off. "How did the other Stooges make out?" Dub-Yay wanted to know. (Lin­coln had told his parents that he and Teddy and Mickey, so unlike the preppy Minerva boys with rich parents, had come to think of themselves as the Three Musketeers, to which his father had imme­diately responded, "Three Stooges would be more like it.") Lincoln swallowed hard. "Mickey got nailed. Number nine." "It's a foolish war," his father conceded. "But you don't get to hold out for a just one." Lincoln supposed he agreed, but it still annoyed him that his father would be so cavalier where his friends were concerned. "What would you say if I went to Canada?" Lincoln ventured. "Not one blessed thing." This statement was delivered without hesitation, as if Dub-Yay had been anticipating the question, given it some serious thought and was anxious, as always, to share his conclusions. "The moment you did that, you would no longer be my son, and we wouldn't be speaking. I didn't name you after Abraham Lincoln so you could become a draft dodger. How fared Brother Edward?" That was his nickname for Teddy, who'd visited them in Dun­bar that summer. Lincoln's mother had liked him immediately, but Dub-Yay hadn't been impressed. It was W. A. Moser's deeply held conviction that a single round of golf would reveal everything you needed to know about a man's character, and he had made up his mind about Teddy on the first tee when he failed to remove his wristwatch. Nothing pleased Wolfgang Amadeus more than to extrapolate the world from a grain of sand. In retrospect, though, Lincoln doubted the wristwatch incident had anything to do with his misgivings about his friend. More likely Teddy had said some­thing provocative about the war or remarked that all the members of the Dunbar Country Club were white and the staff Latino. "Teddy's safe," Lincoln said. "Three hundred-something." "Just as well. I can't imagine what earthly use that boy would be in combat." Or anything else, he seemed to be saying. Had Lincoln even spoken to his mother that evening? Here again, memory, like a conscientious objector, refused to serve. What was etched vividly in Lincoln's brain, however, was the moment when all three Musketeers emerged from the Theta house and found their beautiful d'Artagnan shivering in the December cold out back. Just as he remembered the shameful thought that had entered his head unbidden-- You lucky dog! --when she took a surprised Mickey in her arms and hugged him tight. You had only to glance at Teddy to know he was thinking the same thing. Jacy. Vanished from this very island. Memorial Day weekend, 1971. Excerpted from Chances Are ...: A Novel by Richard Russo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.