Chances Are . . .

“[Trudy] hoped Lincoln would one day come to [share her fond sentiments] about the Chilmark house, and to that end she’d already made the necessary arrangements for him, not his father, to inherit it. She just wanted him to promise that he wouldn’t sell the property except out of some grave necessity, and promise, too, that if he did have to sell it, he wouldn’t share the proceeds with his father, who would hand over the money to his church. It was one thing, she said, for her to give up her sole true faith, but she had no intention of allowing Dub-Yay to permanently endow a bunch of damn snake handlers, not with her money.”

The Chilmark house functions as a multilayered symbol representing Lincoln’s mother’s independence, her childhood freedom, and the ongoing tension in her mismatched marriage. Through this inheritance arrangement, Russo reveals her determination to preserve at least a fragment of autonomy within her otherwise constrained existence. In laying aside her submissive posture to deliver the facts to her son, she also reveals the depths of her contempt for her husband, and her references to his congregation as “a bunch of damn snake handlers” also stresses her constant awareness of the differences between the affluent life that she gave up and the narrow-minded nature of the town in which her marriage to Dub-Yay now imprisons her. By saving the Chilmark house for Lincoln, she attempts to free her son from a similarly narrow-minded existence. This passage also establishes the house as a symbolic battleground where past and present collide.

“Most of [Teddy’s] decisions these days were similarly utilitarian and estranged from the pleasure principle. An even keel, he knew from long experience, was always best. Avoid Sturm und Drang. Highs not too high, lows not too low. In this manner he was sometimes able to ward off his spells—he didn’t know what else to call them—before they gained purchase. Sometimes they manifested as full-blown panic attacks, hurricanes that battered him for a day or two before blowing out to sea, while others descended like fugue states and could linger, like an area of low pressure, for a week or more.”

This passage employs extended meteorological metaphors to externalize Teddy’s psychological struggles, characterizing his mental health as a weather system that he must navigate and predict. The short, clipped sentences mimic Teddy’s thought patterns and reveal his intellectualized, clinical approach to emotional management. Similarly, his rejection of the “pleasure principle” in favor of stability illustrates that his past trauma has shaped his present cautious existence.

“‘Question,’ he said when Teddy retrieved his manuscript from under his chair and prepared to go back to work. ‘Do you remember that history class we both took at Minerva?’ ‘Civil War and Reconstruction,’ Teddy replied without hesitation, as if for some inexplicable reason he too had been thinking about that very class. ‘Professor Ford.’ ‘First day of class he gave us the final-exam question.’ Teddy nodded. ‘What caused the war.’”

This exchange establishes the novel’s preoccupation with causality and the interpretation of past events. The parallel between historical analysis and the friends’ own unresolved mystery creates a distinct narrative resonance, for this conversation suggests that just like the Civil War, Jacy’s disappearance has multiple competing explanations. The characters’ ability to recall this specific class decades later also demonstrates that certain formative experiences continue to shape their thinking, while Ford’s pedagogical approach of presenting the question before the evidence mirrors the novel’s own narrative structure.

“Later, back in the car, Teddy’s keys dangling from the ignition, all three friends had sat in silence, stunned into sobriety by Jacy’s kisses. Mickey spoke first. ‘Okay, we draw straws,’ he said. ‘I don’t see any way around it. One of us is going to have to murder the prick.’ ‘Fine,’ Lincoln said, seemingly for the sake of argument, ‘but then what? There’s still three of us and only one of her.’ ‘Good point,’ Mickey conceded. ‘And you know what? If there were three of her, I’d want all three.’”

This scene employs a darkly comedic dialogue to reveal the depths of the three friends’ infatuation with Jacy while contributing to Russo’s extended red herring, in which he uses multiple opportunities to obliquely suggest that Mickey might be capable of murder. These references, whether serious or half-baked, combine to create an air of expectant tension during Mickey’s climactic confession at the end of the novel. In this early moment, however, the dialogue merely creates situational irony, given that Russo has already revealed the eventuality of Jacy’s disappearance from all three men’s lives.

“WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOSER. Ridiculous name, ridiculous man. That very first summer when Lincoln returned home to Dunbar from Minerva College, he’d begun to see his father with new eyes. His parents were waiting at the gate to greet him, and his first thought was Who’s the little pip-squeak standing next to my mother? Somehow his father had shrunk. Had he been ill? But, no, on closer inspection, he looked hale and hearty, full of his usual piss and vinegar, just…smaller.”

This passage captures Lincoln’s perceptual shift as his college education creates a critical distance between him and his domineering father. The rhetorical question and visual metaphor of physical “shrinking” show that Dub-Yay no longer wields the same degree of psychological power over his son, who has recently broadened his mental horizons. This moment connects to broader questions of masculinity as Lincoln begins questioning the model of masculinity that his father represents. This key shift in perception parallels Lincoln’s present-day conflict over whether to sell the Chilmark house, and the narrative suggests that the essence of this struggle lies between his father’s materialistic values and his mother’s sentimental attachment to the place.

“Jacy, nestled comfortably in [Teddy’s] arms. That she seemed to be about to kiss him. No, that she was kissing him, kisses even more deliriously thrilling than the one she’d given him the night they’d returned from the dog track. But that night she’d kissed Lincoln and Mickey, too. Since then each of them had been wondering the same thing: which one she’d choose in the unlikely event it ever came to that. Was that what this moment, this embrace, this sweetly salty kiss meant? Could she actually have chosen him?”

During their pivotal swim at Gay Head, Teddy experiences a moment of romantic fulfillment that is immediately undercut by uncertainty. His progression from “about to kiss” to “was kissing” to questioning what the kiss means reflects his innate inability to trust his good fortune. The passage also employs the vividness of the “sweetly salty kiss” to contrast the physicality of the moment with Teddy’s cerebral doubts. The passage illuminates the competitive undercurrents within the friendship and connects to the novel’s exploration of chance and choice, suggesting that random circumstances determine which desires are fulfilled and which remain unrequited.

“Motive. Means. Opportunity. Except for when that neighbor stopped by, she was alone with you and your friends that whole weekend. Back then? If I’m leading the investigation, I’m thinking it’s one of you. One of you did it, and the other two are helping cover it up. Or all three of you did it. […] This guy she’s gonna marry has money and prospects. You don’t. Which isn’t what you want to hear.”

Coffin’s blunt police assessment articulates the suspicion that has haunted Lincoln for decades. The terse, staccato rhythm of “Motive. Means. Opportunity” creates tension while mimicking procedural language. In essence, this confrontational dialogue shows that the absence of definitive truth gives ruse to multiple potential narratives. Coffin’s class-based assumptions about motives for what he assumes is a murder reveal the ways in which social hierarchies can shape misperceptions.

“As they all grew more confident of the lyrics, they turned, arm in arm, and serenaded the night itself, the moonlight rippling on the distant ocean. They sang as if they were still all for one and one for all and would be so forever. To his astonishment, Teddy felt his own heavy burden begin to lift, at least a little. Maybe, he thought, if they just sang loud enough, everything would be okay after all.”

This passage depicts the friends’ final moment of harmony in 1971 before their permanent separation, and the music motif functions as both a literal action and a metaphor for their temporarily unified spirits. The evocative imagery of “moonlight rippling on the distant ocean” creates a dreamlike quality that emphasizes the scene’s ephemeral beauty, and Teddy’s momentary optimism, conveyed through his stream of consciousness, makes the coming disillusionment all the more devastating to the three friends, whose lives will be torn apart by chance and choice.

“Yesterday, with Jacy sobbing in his arms, he’d wanted more than anything to comfort her, to convince her that even though his chances weren’t awfully good, neither were his circumstances hopeless. Normal function, he told her, was sometimes restored even years after the injury. […] Nor did he tell her that right from the start he’d somehow known that he wouldn’t be one of the lucky ones, that how he was at present—able to ejaculate but not to engage in intercourse, able to fall deeply in love but not to express it—was how he would remain.”

This revelation explains the core of Teddy’s identity and his tendency to hold back from fully connecting with others. The clinical, stigmatizing language of phrases such as “normal function” contrasts with the emotional devastation that Teddy feels in this moment, and it is clear that he is invoking academic wording in order to distance himself from his own anguish. This disclosure recasts his relationship with Jacy and explains his later resistance to forming intimate connections, for he falsely equates the ability to have intercourse with the ability to forge a meaningful relationship with a woman.

“Because admit it, ever since setting foot on the Vineyard, guilt or something akin to it had been [Lincoln’s] more or less constant companion. He’d assumed its source was the decision to put his mother’s house on the market, but what if it was something else? Earlier, in the dark microfilm room at the Vineyard Gazette, when Jacy’s face appeared on the screen this ambient sense of guilt had morphed into something more like dread; and later, after he’d explained the disappearance and Beverly concluded that Jacy was still on the island, his stomach had done a somersault.”

Lincoln’s emotional response to Martha’s Vineyard demonstrates that key settings can trigger buried emotions and memories. The Chilmark house serves as a psychological symbol that connects Lincoln to the unresolved questions surrounding Jacy’s disappearance. The progression from “guilt” to “dread” creates a visceral rendering of his resurfacing emotions.

“‘She wanted to know if it hadn’t occurred to me that Jacy might be waiting for one of us—okay, I guess me—to work up the courage to declare his true feelings.’ […] ‘When I explained how unlikely this was, that Jacy was engaged to a law student from a rich family, Mom said that maybe she wanted to be unengaged both to him and them.’”

In these musings, Lincoln articulates the class differences that shaped the friends’ perceptions of Jacy and of their own opportunities in life. Lincoln’s mother serves as an interpretive voice who disrupts his younger self’s assumptions about Jacy’s motivations, and her perspective on the topic introduces the possibility that Jacy may have been seeking an escape from her predetermined path. The dialogue thus draws the narrative focus to the issue of missed opportunities and alternative life trajectories that hinge on single moments of courage or cowardice.

“The emotion on his friend’s face was one Teddy hadn’t felt in such a long time that he at first couldn’t identify it. Joy. Pure, unadulterated joy. What Mickey loved now—rock and roll played at a very high volume—was what he’d loved as a boy. Recognizing what filled his soul to bursting, he’d cleaved to it, and across the decades they had remained the most faithful of lovers.”

Music functions as a recurring motif that reveals Mickey’s authentic self, but this image nonetheless stands in contrast to Lincoln’s growing suspicions about his friend’s undisclosed past. The passage employs personification by describing music as Mickey’s most “faithful” lover, creating a note of irony given his failed marriages and the friends’ shared love for the absent Jacy. Additionally, Teddy’s observation that he “couldn’t identify” joy in himself creates a distinct contrast between Mickey’s apparent fulfillment and his own emotional numbness, reinforcing the novel’s exploration of how different personalities navigate life’s disappointments.

“If he’d been the kind of boy who could break another kid’s nose for tripping him, then mightn’t he also have discovered that he enjoyed doing so? […] And later still, having developed a taste for risk and physical confrontation, he might’ve ignored his high draft number, enlisted, gone to Vietnam and gotten himself killed there. […] Squinted at in this fashion—when he awoke from surgery with only one eye, would squint still be an operable verb?—human destiny was both complex (it had a lot of working parts) and simple (in the end, you were who you were).”

Teddy’s anesthesia-induced reflections demonstrate the novel’s preoccupation with counterfactual thinking. As he deliriously connects his adolescent spinal injury with his current eye injury, his thought patterns suggest that he has identified a deterministic pattern in his life despite the many chance elements. His wordplay with the word “squint” also adds a tragicomic tone to his philosophical musings.

“What he really longed for, he realized, was his generation’s naïve conviction that if the world turned out to be irredeemably corrupt, they could just opt out. Embarrassing, when you put it like that, but hadn’t that been the central article of their faith? They’d believed that being right about the war their parents were so stubbornly wrong about meant that they were somehow special, maybe even exceptional.”

Lincoln’s realization articulates the generational disillusionment that frames the friends’ journey from idealistic college students to compromised adults. The rhetorical question posed in this passage also creates an intimate conversational tone, and Russo uses this tactic to pose a broader philosophical question that can be applied to anyone’s youthful idealism and subsequent adjustments to reality.

“When you threw a punch, whatever was coiled in you got released, and release, well, what was better than that? Starting and finishing a fight with a single punch, as Mickey’d done with Troyer? That was the absolute best. Proving that any job, no matter how dubious, could be done well.”

This passage examines Mickey’s memory of punching Troyer in order to reveals his complex relationship with violence. The phrasing “whatever was coiled in you got released” invokes the image of a striking snake, suggesting a lurking, inherent violence whose sudden expression is both dangerous and cathartic. Mickey’s belief that even “dubious” jobs should be done well connects to his working-class values and reveals his father’s influence. The passage also foreshadows his later confession about his vengeful attack on the odious Donald Calloway, whose sexual abuse of Jacy left her with lasting trauma.

“Had his father lived, things would’ve been different, Mickey thought, but maybe this was another lie. Strange, and yet somehow fitting, to be back here where the life of deception he hadn’t planned on had begun. This island. This house.”

Mickey’s reflection demonstrates how the Chilmark house functions as a symbol of origin for his lifetime of deception. The short, fragmented sentences, “This island. This house,” create a staccato rhythm that emphasizes his starkly inevitable emotional connection to the setting, and his uncertainty about whether things would truly have been different if his father had lived reveals his struggle with fate and personal choice.

“To Mickey, the Theta house’s kitchen felt a little like a church, or rather how he imagined church was supposed to feel but never did, at least not to him. He’d enjoyed Minerva, but unlike Lincoln and Teddy he’d never truly believed he belonged there. Sure it was better than West Haven, but that didn’t mean he had to love it.”

Mickey’s comparison of the kitchen to a church transforms a humble workspace into a sacred realm where he feels authentic. The passage illustrates the class differences that separate Mickey and his friends, and his qualified statement about Minerva being “better than West Haven” reveals his ambivalence about the issue of social mobility. This reflection demonstrates that despite his education at an elite institution, his identity will always be tied to his working-class background.

“And there he was, behind them, the grinning tuxedoed bartender, champagne bottle raised, as if to top them all off. Young, dark skinned, curly haired, handsome. The only person in the picture not looking at the camera was Viv, whose head was turned so she could regard the bartender, and the expression on her young face was one Jacy had never seen before.”

The photograph of Jacy’s mother and her biological father, Andy, dramatically reveals Jacy’s true parentage and disrupts her understanding of her identity. The composition of the image shows the social elites in front and her biological father literally in the background, serving them. The bartender’s posture with “champagne bottle raised” ironically mirrors the toast, suggesting his unwitting participation in a celebration of a false future. Finally, Viv’s decision to look toward Andy rather than the camera creates a triangle of gazes that visually connect mother, daughter, and biological father across time.

“As she went to drink, though, she saw that her father’s obituary had stuck to the bottom of the glass. The date of his death—May 2, 1971—was magnified […]. She gagged again, this time spitting the pills back into her hand. May 2nd. How many times had she read the obituary without noticing the date, its significance?”

As Jacy’s discovery startles her out of her plan to die by suicide, this pivotal moment employs the glass of water as a symbolic lens that reveals the truth about her father’s death, which took place mere days before her graduation. While Jacy had always blamed her father for not attending the event, this moment reveals that he had already died and that her mother never told her the truth. The water imagery also creates a connection between Jacy and her father, who died choking on water due to his cerebellar ataxia. This revelation transforms Jacy’s suicidal despair into a determination to live, making it clear that secrets from the past can suddenly become come to light and reshape the future.

“In the bathroom Teddy, who’d asked for a short break so he could take another painkiller, did so, then stood staring at the wreck of the man in the mirror and marveling, as he always did in the aftermath of his spells, just how much they resembled tropical storms. As they approached, he often could sense the change in barometric pressure, as he had done on the ferry, even though the storm was still far out at sea, churning away, gathering force, bearing down.”

The passage employs an extended metaphor comparing Teddy’s psychological episodes to tropical storms, capturing both their predictability and their devastating impact. The meteorological language creates a vivid sensory experience of Teddy’s inner turmoil, with phrases like “churning away” and “bearing down” conveying the inexorable approach of his anxiety attacks.

“‘You always got the impression that sex itself was somehow secondary, as if she was driven by something even more powerful than desire, or maybe apart from desire. Like that night at the Theta house. I’m not saying she didn’t enjoy kissing us, but those kisses weren’t really about us.’”

Mickey’s observation about Jacy’s relationship to her sexuality reveals her use of physical intimacy as a form of control rather than genuine connection. This observation recontextualizes earlier events, showing that the men misinterpreted Jacy’s actions through the lens of their own desires. The revelation connects to secrets and hidden truths (See: Symbols & Motifs), suggesting that even in intimate relationships, true understanding may be impossible. This insight into Jacy’s behavior also adds complexity to her character, suggesting that her actions were driven by motivations that the men were ill-equipped to comprehend at the time.

“I’ll tell you the truth. I didn’t recognize her at first. She was skin and bones and you know what? I was scared to wake her up, afraid she’d start in yelling at me again. But then she twitched awake and smiled at me, and I saw she was the old Jacy. She said, ‘Did you hear the news?’ and it took me a moment to understand what she was asking because her speech was slurred and the effort to speak caused the elbow she’d broken to spasm.”

This passage captures Mickey’s anguish upon finding the disabled Jacy outside his apartment after a year-long absence, and his visceral reaction to her physical deterioration reveals both his shock and his enduring love. The stark contrast between his memory of Jacy and her present condition is emphasized by precise details like her “skin and bones” physique and her “slurred” speech. However, her simple question about the amnesty for men who dodged the draft shows that she is the same old Jacy.

“Why, he wondered, was he so resistant to that possibility? Just last night Mickey had tried to convince them he was no longer the same person they’d known back in the seventies, but wasn’t he really just talking about disillusionment? […] But wasn’t that the point? If he was feeling shame, it was himself he was ashamed of, not some new person born of moral weakness.”

Lincoln’s interior monologue directly addresses the novel’s central question about whether people fundamentally change or merely reveal different aspects of themselves over time. The passage’s syntax mirrors Lincoln’s analytical thought process, using a series of rhetorical questions and tentative answers to demonstrate his methodical approach to understanding human behavior.