Author: Richard Russo
Chances Are… is a book by Richard Russo, centered on memory, regret, class, and aging. Three college friends, Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey, reunite in their 60s in the same cabin on Martha’s Vineyard decades after they first went to the cabin right following the completion of their college degrees in 1971. A woman they were all in love with, Jacy, disappeared right after the trip, which stayed in the friends’ memories.
The novel alternates between the present day (2015) and flashbacks from the 1960s and 1970s, and friends’ lives afterwards. The 2015 writing is about the present day, their reunion, and trying to understand what happened back in the 1970s. Flashbacks explore their youth, relationships, family histories, and their love for Jacy.
While there is a mystery in the book surrounding Jacy’s disappearance after the cabin trip, this only gets fully explored towards the end of the book. Most of the book is about memory, missed chances in life, unresolved guilt, male friendship, emotional repression, and aging, as well as the role of luck or chances in shaping lives (the phrase “chances are” is mentioned a few times in the book and presents a really good book title). Some of the questions the author explores are: ‘What do you do with a past you can’t fix?’, ‘Was Jacy’s fate random or a result of choices?’, ‘Is the past as they all remember it, or something else?’, ‘How do men articulate feelings even after decades have passed?’, and ‘What did our lives amount to now that we are approaching old age?’. The novel really makes one think about the choices they made in their lives, how those choices affected reality, and whether we led meaningful lives.
However, the novel is even more than what I have just described (which in itself is a lot and enough to make one read this remarkable novel). The novel is also about class, gender, socialization, and misrecognition in communication. The three men shared a formative moment in college, during the 1960s, but their life stories and capital are different; for example, they all studied at an elite school, but their later lives reflect how early positioning influenced mobility, with reunion showing that class is not just economic but also embodied in confidence, speech, and decision-making. The novel is also about men who cannot communicate because emotional repression is normalized, silence is treated as strength, and feelings are never articulated openly, showing the effects of masculine socialization and ‘boys don’t cry’ upbringing and culture, furthering what I have argued my whole life: that patriarchy is bad for everyone.
Chance appears neutral, but opportunities are not equally distributed, nor outcomes reflect purely choices; outcomes are linked to structures, too, but disguised as randomness. Chances Are… is thus also about class shaping life paths while appearing as chance, masculinity limiting communication and emotional processing, memory reconstructing the past and creating cognitive dissonance, and silence sustaining social order by avoiding uncomfortable truths. It is indeed a novel about misrecognition over time, and how people come to believe their lives just happened, when in fact, their lives have been structured all along.
A remarkable novel, very different than stuff I normally read (the value of participating in book clubs and discovering new authors reasserts itself with this book, again) 🙂
Thank you for reading!