CHANCES ARE... by Richard Russo

This may not be a mystery novel, but the storyline does revolve around Jacy’s disappearance in 1971.  She and three guys, all head-over-heels in love with her—Mickey, Teddy, and Lincoln—had just graduated from an exclusive New England college.  The Vietnam War was raging, and the draft lottery dealt each guy a different hand.  Now the three men, in their late sixties, have reunited for a long weekend, and it was all too obvious to me what happened to Jacy, more or less.  The first half of the novel was much more engrossing than the second half, which is largely Jacy’s story, and, for me, she did not leap off the page as well as the men did in the first half.  I’ll spare you the details that made her whereabouts obvious, and some parts of her story did not make sense to me.  My biggest beef with this book is that Russo failed to make me appreciate Jacy’s charisma.  Why exactly did all three guys adore her?  I understand why none of them made a play for her; they would probably have sacrificed their friendship with the other two.   Plus, she was engaged, but her fiancé attended a different school.  The three guys all worked in the dining hall of Jacy’s sorority house and were not in her same league financially.  (I loved the comment in the book that only the wealthy use the word “summer” as a verb.)  Still, there was certainly more to Jacy than her elevated social standing.  She came across as free-spirited and compassionate and perhaps a bit elusive.  For me, the most intriguing character is Teddy, who struggles with both mental and physical issues, but he is not a particularly appealing character.  That distinction belongs to Lincoln, who is the main character, but I wish his wife Anita, an attorney who passed up an opportunity to attend Stanford law school, had appeared on the page more frequently.  Her wisdom far exceeds that of any of the other characters.