Chasing Windmills
Catherine Ryan Hyde, Doubleday, 2008

Chasing Windmills, Catherine Ryan Hyde, Doubleday, 2008

Catherine Ryan Hyde’s Chasing Windmills doesn’t claim to be anything more than an homage to West Side Story, and it doesn’t accomplish more than that. It is a sweet, naïve love story, and its gentleness is charming, if shallow. The novel suffers, however, from an ambiguous air, and I’m not sure how easy it will be for Hyde to find her target audience, whatever that audience might be. Constructed with the unadorned innocence of an old-fashioned romance novel, the story would seem to have little appeal for anyone who hasn’t yet reached middle age, yet the combined ages of the two central characters don’t quite add up to 40. The youthful protagonists would suggest that Hyde is aiming the book at young adults; but if that’s the case, why base the story on a musical that was popular before their parents were born? The novel pulls itself in two directions simultaneously and in so doing falls into the cracks between demographics. 

The novel begins with the chance meeting of two young New Yorkers who happen to catch each other’s eye on the subway in the middle of the night. Sebastian is 17 years old and leads a very isolated life; after the disappearance of his mother 10 years earlier (his father claims she died), Sebastian has been mostly confined to his apartment, forbidden to have friends, attend school or have any substantial contact with the outside world. His only friend is an elderly neighbor he sees when he is supposed to be out running. Maria is a 22-year-old mother of two young children trapped in a relationship with an abusive live-in boyfriend. She has no friends beyond her Tarot card-reading sister. Both Sebastian and Maria cope with their circumscribed lives by sneaking out to ride the subway in the wee hours. 

Maria is obsessed with West Side Story, as was her mother, apparently. Maria was named after the show’s central character, and Maria named her own daughter Natalie, presumably for Natalie Wood, the actress who played Maria in the movie version of the story. Maria is determined to make her life parallel that of her fictional namesake, to the point that she insists on renaming Sebastian after the West Side Story hero, Tony. Hyde, too, gives us endless parallels, going so far as to have Sebastian/Tony run through the darkened streets of his girlfriend’s neighborhood yelling “Maria!” at the top of his voice. At least, though, Hyde copies West Side Story openly and does not try to hide her allusions or be clever about them in any way. I’m only disappointed that she doesn’t give us a version of the finger-snapping brawl between the Sharks and the Jets. 

Chasing Windmills is not an update of West Side Story. If anything, Windmills is less streetwise than the musical version of West Side Story and even less daring than that story’s inspiration, Romeo and Juliette. Neither Sebastian nor Maria ever thinks a hard thought, something less than credible in characters with their histories. Sebastian could not be more unlike a 21st-century teenager; he, for example, coyly refuses to give intimate details to the reader about his relationship with Maria because it wouldn’t be gentlemanly. Maria, for her part, is surprisingly dewy-eyed for a New Yorker who had her first baby by the time she was 16. 

Hyde doesn’t give us much that befits the purportedly harsh lives of these characters. Very few bad words, no frightening violence, no sex and plenty of hope. Even the story’s abusers – Sebastian’s father and Maria’s boyfriend – are not threatening. There is never the sense that they are truly dangerous, and when they are told sternly to stop being mean, they stop. Hyde’s picture of abusive relationships is drawn from a textbook outline of stereotypes – and the details of the abuse are always reined in before they become distasteful or horrifying. 

Indeed, Hyde’s unwillingness to go too far robs the book of any suspense; the reader can be assured that there is nothing too upsetting around the corner. And if the book’s ending defies fairy tale expectations, it lacks the guts to go for tragedy, a reluctance that would make both Arthur Laurents and Shakespeare shake their heads in consternation. 

If you think of Windmills as a novel for teens and young adults – a designation that the publisher does not give the book but one which those familiar with Hyde’s work seem to assume – it’s easier to forgive the story’s timidity. There’s definitely nothing here for readers, young readers included, who require their fiction to have a sharp edge, but there’s just enough unpredictability, I suspect, to offend readers who like their romances tidy. If there are readers whose preferences fall somewhere between those two extremes, then they might enjoy Chasing Windmills, a competently crafted story with few surprises and no cynicism at all.

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