Literature / The Probable Future

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Published in 2003, The Probable Future is a novel by Alice Hoffman which follows three generations of the women of the Sparrow family—Stella, the daughter; Jenny, the mother; and Elinor, the grandmother—as well as (more sporadically) the many other inhabitants and history of the rural Massachusetts town of Unity from which they hail. Having elements of Magical Realism, Romance, Historical Fiction, a Coming of Age Story, and a Thriller, at its heart The Probable Future is a story about love, reconciliation and redemption.

The story starts with Stella and her mother Jenny living in Boston. Stella has a strained relationship with her mother, who insists on inserting herself into every aspect of Stella's life, but a better one with her father Will Avery, Jenny's Jaded Washout ex-husband. Jenny for her part has an even more strained relationship with her mother Elinor, who neglected her and disapproved of her relationship with Will, leading her to drop out of high school and run away with him at age 17.

The plot is set in motion on Stella's thirteenth birthday. Like all Sparrow women before her, ever since her ancestor Rebecca wandered out of the woods of Unity thirteen generations before, Stella was born in March and, on her thirteenth birthday, receives a magical ability. Her mother Jenny can see people's dreams. Her grandmother Elinor is a Living Lie Detector. And Stella, to her distress, learns that she can see how some people will die.

While celebrating her birthday with her father at a restaurant, Stella notices that a woman at a neighbouring table will be murdered, her throat cut in the night. She pleads with her father to stop it from happening, leading him to warn the woman and later file a police report. When the woman turns up murdered a week later, his foreknowledge of the event causes him to be arrested and, after he shares how he knew, leads to Stella and Jenny being hounded by the press. For her own safety, Stella is sent to stay with her grandmother in Cake House, the Sparrow family's ancestral home in Unity. And over the course of the story, both Jenny and Will find themselves returning to Unity as well. There they all must contend with their relationships with each other, the town and its people, and the mistakes of the past.

And, back in Boston, there's a murderer on the hunt for the girl who knew about his crime a week before he committed it...

The Probable Future provides examples of:

• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Downplayed. The boys with roguish charm are often more romantically popular than their more responsible compatriots, but they often undergo character development in order to make their relationships work. And some relationships (Elinor and Dr Brock Stewart, Juliet Aronson and Hap Stewart) start because of the former's attraction to the latter's kindness and integrity instead.
  • Will Avery is very popular with the ladies, making Jenny fall in love with him instead of his more responsible brother Matt, but she divorces Will before the start of the book, who becomes a better person through his love to Liza Hull, and she then falls in love with Will's brother Matt.
  • Stella falls in love with the town's teen delinquent (and Will's spiritual successor) Jimmy Elliot, instead of her friend Hap Stewart, but he becomes a more responsible person before the end of the book as well.
• All Relatives Share a Surname: Even though every previous Sparrow woman (besides Rebecca) has been married and the family goes back to the 1600s, every woman has remained a Sparrow woman, retaining the name and passing it down to their respective daughter. Even Jenny Sparrow, who ran away to marry Will Avery and took his name, returns to the Sparrow name after divorcing him. Their daughter is called Stella Sparrow Avery.
• Bee Afraid:
  • When the murderer runs from where he tried to kill Stella, he runs past the massive bee hive in the old oak tree, disturbing them and causing them to swarm and chase him.
  • Will Avery is extremely allergic to bees and avoids them wherever he can.
• Big Friendly Dog: Elinor owns an old wolfhound as big as a lion, named Argus, who, though he manages to scare off the odd trespasser by barking, is a "pussycat" as Stella notes.
• Blessing: The Sparrow women's magical gifts seem to be this, gifts from fate itself, even if they don't always seem that way at first, but they all turn out to be very helpful, either in conquering the difficulties their particular lives have in store for them or overcoming the one massive crisis that happens to strike the town of Unity in their lifetimes.
• Bug Buzz: The old oak in Unity houses a massive beehive and the droning of its bees can be heard from quite far away.
• The City vs. the Country: In favour of the country, but downplayed. Jenny Sparrow and Will Avery run away from the small rural town of Unity when they are young and end up living unhappily in Boston. Then their daughter, Stella, goes to with her grandmother in Unity, and both Jenny and Will end up moving back to Unity separately over the course of the book. After some character development they all decide to stay, the reason being their love of people in the town. But the book does not shy away from the evils that can happen in small towns, including the historical drowning of Rebecca Sparrow as a suspected witch. Many of the town's families also have members who live or work in the larger cities of Massachusetts. This theme is highlighted when Stella's best friend from Boston, Juliet, comes to visit and teasingly refers to Stella and her new friend Hap Stewart as "country bumpkins". Though Juliet soon goes back home, she and Hap quickly fall for each other, talking on the phone every day. It's not made clear where they plan to live if they move in together.
• Climactic Maiming: Hap Stewart's spine is broken when the murderer catches up with Stella while she and Hap are boating on Hourglass Lake in the middle of the night. The murderer hits Hap with an oar and makes him fall overboard.
• Close-Knit Community: The inhabitants of Unity may bicker and disagree, but when push comes to shove, they stand by each other.
• Delinquents: Will Avery was one as a teen, Jimmy Elliot is Unity's current one.
• Comfort the Dying: Given the themes of love and flashbacks to posthumous characters, this happens many times in the book.
  • Elinor Sparrow and Matt Avery comforted Catherine, Matt and Will's mother, as she lay dying, the former reading fairy tales to her.
  • Liza Hull held her baby daughter in her arms as she died.
  • As Eli Hathaway dies in the back of an ambulance, Stella holds his hand and tells him he is forgiven for his family's crimes.
  • As the town doctor, Brock Stewart does this a lot. He's with his beloved Elinor in her garden when she dies as well.
• Coming of Age Story: The story follows Stella from her thirteenth birthday, when she gains her magical ability like all Sparrow women before her and has her first period. Over the course of the story she grows from a frustrated girl desperate to be out from under her mother's thumb and with no real goal in life, to a self-assured young women who knows what she wants and how to get it. And she also falls in love in the process.
• Destructive Romance: Jenny and Will run away together, but their relationship is never healthy and deteriorates until they divorce when Stella is twelve. The main reason for this is that Will is an overall terrible human being and husband.
• Deuteragonist: Equally split between Jenny Sparrow, Will Avery, Elinor Sparrow and Matt Avery.
• Dramatic Spine Injury: The moment she meets him, Stella sees Hap's Stewart's death: A broken neck from being thrown from a horse. She realises her mistake at the climax of the book when Hap's spine is shattered by a blow from an oar, used by someone riding in a rowboat called the Seahorse. He falls overboard, but is rescued by Jenny and lives to tell the tale.
• Dysfunctional Family: Played for Drama rather than Played for Laughs: The current Sparrow family is this. Stella and her mother Jenny have an extremely strained relationship over Jenny's overbearingness; Jenny and her mother Elinor haven't talked in decades due to Elinor's neglect when Jenny was a child and because Jenny ran away from home at age 17; Stella and her grandmother talk in secret over the phone and Stella pretends not to notice that her mother throws away every birthday present Elinor sends; Jenny and the person she ran away with, Will Avery, are now divorced, a result of Will's long list of character flaws and his constant philandering, though Stella does have a good enough relationship with her father; and Will and his brother Matt haven't talked in a decade because Matt caught him in one of those instances of philandering. Them all undergoing character development and reconciling is a big part of the novel's plot.
• Everyone Went to School Together: Justified: Due to Unity only having one high school, every adult of around the same age went to school with each other.
• Elopement: Jenny and Will run away from Unity and get married. Later, after their divorce, they both return.
• Ensemble Cast: While Stella is The Protagonist due to her having the most focus, the rest of the characters from whose perspective the story is told have similar focus; The Deuteragonist is equally likely to be her mother Jenny, her father Will, her grandmother Elinor, or her uncle Matt, while characters such as Dr Brock Stewart, Hap Stewart and Liza Hull also get time in the limelight.
• Forgiveness: A major theme of the book.
  • When Eli Hathaway, the last of the Hathaways, is dying, he meets with Stella and mistakes her for Rebecca. Seemingly embodying his family and his ancestor Charles Hathaway, who was partially responsible for Rebecca's death and who had taken her bell, compass and star, before being driven mad by them and breaking his neck while riding his horse. Eli gives Stella the star, which he had worn round his neck since his own father's death, as had every ancestor up until Charles Hathaway before him, and makes her the trustee of his holdings, thereby earning her forgiveness and mending the wrong that had been done 300 years before.
  • After Will Avery turns over a new leaf and falls in love with Liza Hull, he first asks the great oak tree which Liza calls a "tree of mercy" for forgiveness, which Liza grants him, then goes and asks his ex-wife Jenny for forgiveness for all the horrible things he did, for the sake of them being better parents to Stella.
  • After Jenny and Elinor make great effort to show the love they feel for each other and it becomes clear to Jenny just how pained her mother feels over hurting her from the dream Jenny witnesses, she goes and joins her feverish mother in her bed, and they forgive each other.
  • As recorded by Charles Hathaway, the last words Rebecca Sparrow spoke were "I forgive you", whispered to Mary Hathaway, widow of her lover Samuel and who had been the first to accuse her of witchcraft, but who would also adopt Rebecca and Samuel's daughter after her death.
• Functional Magic: Every Sparrow woman receives a magical ability on their thirteenth birthday. They also have a connection with sparrows, being able to call them to themselves by standing with their arms outstretched.
• Hereditary Hairstyle: Until Stella, who has her father's blonde hair, all Sparrow women had raven black hair, inherited from their progenitor Rebecca.
• Historical Fiction: The book dives into the history of the town of Unity and especially that of the Sparrow family, noting how they were affected by events such as the American Revolution and American Civil War.
• Home Sweet Home: All the main characters find or rediscover a love for the town of Unity and decide to stay there.
• Heartfelt Apology: Instrumental in the reconciliation of many characters, culminating in the apology Eli Hathaway gives Stella on behalf of his entire family to her entire family.
• Immoral Journalist: The journalists in the story think nothing of hotly pursuing and harassing Jenny and Stella, a single mother and her daughter, for their connection to a murder suspect. Their insistence is the main reason why Stella is sent to Cake House in the first place. Later, when they interview the murder suspect Will Avery (Jenny's ex-husband and Stella's father) on TV, they do it in front of Jenny and Stella's apartment building, inadvertently giving the actual murderer their address.
• Kill the Parent, Raise the Child: The Hathaways are the most responsible for Rebecca Sparrow's death, but adopt her daughter Sarah.
• Magical Realism: The Sparrow women all have one magical ability and there are a few other events which are hard to explain without invoking the supernatural, but these aren't seen as particularly strange by the average person and otherwise the setting is identical to real-world Massachusetts.
• Maiden, Mother, and Crone: The present-day Sparrow women map rather flawlessly onto this trio, especially with the reputation Sparrow women have for being witches, with Stella being the Maiden growing into sexual maturity, Jenny being the caring and reliable, if overbearing, Mother, and Elinor being the sharp-tongued and bitter, but still loving, Crone.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The Sparrow women each all have an explicitly magical ability, but for many other things, such as their connection with sparrows, Charles Hathaway being driven mad by Rebecca Sparrow's belongings after her death, Eli Hathaway seemingly channeling his ancestor Charles, plants no longer growing where Rebecca's blood fell as she was dragged to her death, the bees in Elinor's garden leaving and returning, and the murderer dying by the last branch of the old oak tree falling on him, it's not made clear if it's supernatural or just coincidence (with sometimes accompanying superstition).
• Memorial Statue: Unity's Civil War monument is secretly this, depicting a soldier on a horse who is to represent all the soldiers who gave their lives, but who is secretly modelled after the dead son of the mayor at the time it was commissioned.
• Parents as People: Most of the parents in the book are flawed and make mistakes, often understandable ones given their lives and even sometimes grievous ones that cause their children to become estranged, but still genuinely love their children.
  • Elinor neglected Jenny after her husband died (and was revealed to have been cheating on her), sinking into despair and cutting herself off from the world by focussing on her gardening. This caused Jenny to run away from home with Will, whom Elinor disapproved of due to his consummate lies. This deeply hurt Elinor.
  • Jenny swore never to neglect her own daughter, Stella, like her mother did, but this resulted in her becoming overbearing and inserting herself into every aspect of her daughter's life in her effort to care for her, causing their relationship to be similarly strained.
  • Will loves his daughter Stella and wants what's best for her, but is unable to provide due to his many character flaws.
• Pest Controller: Downplayed. The Sparrow women have an innate connection with sparrows and can summon them by stretching their arms in front of them and closing their eyes. They become entirely covered with sparrows when they do this. They do not control them beyond this, however, though it is said that the way Rebecca survived on her own in the woods was by the sparrows bringing her food. When Sarah Sparrow, Rebecca's daughter, stole Rebecca's belongings back from the Hathaways, this included the braid of her hair that was cut off. After making the wooden case that would hold these items, she gave several strands of Rebecca's hair to the sparrows who were waiting patiently.
• Police Are Useless:
  • Downplayed: Despite being warned by Will about a murder a week before it happens, the police in Boston laugh it off and do nothing to prevent it, then arrest him. This is somewhat justified because they had no reason to believe Will, who only knew himself because of his daughter's magical premonition (which only told her who was going to die and how, with no other details), and later quite logically arrest the man who knew the details of the murder a week beforehand instead of believing his story about his daughter's ability. But they play no part in stopping the murderer or preventing him from trying to murder Stella.
  • Justified: The most difficult case the police in Unity had to deal with before finding a coldblooded murderer was ridding the Elliot's attic of a family of rabid raccoons.
• Port Town: Unity lies by the sea and used to be one, but the docks were abandoned a long time ago.
• Posthumous Character: Many. On the one hand there are the historical characters, dead before any of the present-day characters could meet them, but who have a large impact on the characters and plot regardless; the pre-eminent one being Rebecca Sparrow, the Sparrow family's progenitor. On the other hand there are the characters who died before the beginning of the plot, but who are remembered by the present-day characters, such as Elinor's husband and Jenny's father Saul and Will and Matt Avery's mother Catherine.
• The Protagonist: Stella has the most focus and her actions drive the plot the most, but many other characters also have their stories told in the course of the book.
• Quirky Town: Unity is one, having a very Close-Knit Community and memorable inhabitants, but it's not all positive: Almost no one likes Sissy Elliot, the Elliot family's matriarch; people fear Elinor; and Jimmy Elliot is personally responsible for the majority of the committed crime. And that's not mentioning the town's dark past.
• Red Herring: Over the course of the story the town acquires a new pizza delivery driver, who's mentioned to be staring at Stella and Juliet despite him being in his 30s and who later is uncomfortably pushy in giving Stella a lift, and a new taxi driver. Both leave the reader wondering if they're the murderer, come to town to find Stella and having acquired a job that lets them drive around town without suspicion, but it turns out neither of them are.
• Romance Novel: A large part of the plot is the main characters falling in love, whether it's Stella and Jimmy Elliot, Jenny and Matt Avery, Elinor and Dr Brock Stewart, Will Avery and Liza Hull, or Hap Stewart and Juliet Aronson.
• Same Surname Means Related: Many of Unity's families have lived there for hundreds of years, so a character in the present having the same name as a historical character is not unusual. But it becomes a plot point that Eli Hathaway, the town's elderly taxi driver who was only mentioned in passing for most of the book, turns out to be the last direct descendent of Charles Hathaway, who adopted Rebecca Sparrow before casting her out and was driven mad from guilt over her death; Samuel Hathaway, Charles' son and Rebecca's lover; and Mary Hathaway, Samuel's wife, who adopted Rebecca and Samuel's daughter Sarah after Rebecca's death. Eli is revealed to have been wearing Rebecca's star around his neck for his entire life, the last of the items Rebecca had on her when emerging from Unity's woods, which were taken by the Hathaway's on her death and (except for the star) were stolen back by Sarah. Every Hathaway is revealed to have worn the star for their entire life after the previous wearer died, ever since it was discovered being worn by Charles upon his death. Returning the star to the Sparrow family is what heals a 300 year old wound.
• Sent Into Hiding: Stella being sent to stay with her grandmother Elinor is the main reason she, her mother Jenny and her father Will eventually travel there themselves and reconnect with the town, their family members there, and others.
• Seers: Stella can see how certain people will die.
• Shrine to the Fallen: In Cake House there is a glass case with several relics which had belonged to the Sparrow family's progenitor, Rebecca (a silver compass, a tarnished golden bell, and a lock of her hair), as well as ten arrowheads which had pierced her skin. The case had originally been made of wood by Rebecca's daughter Sarah, who had been raised by the people responsible for Rebecca's death, the Hathaways, who had taken her possessions. They were stolen back by Sarah when she was thirteen.
• Single Line of Descent: Every Sparrow woman had only one daughter, who all took after their mothers much more than their fathers and had the surname "Sparrow".
• Slashed Throat: How the murder victim is killed.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman!: When they're not helpful for enduring the difficult lives fate has willed them to have, overcoming a crisis that happens in their lifetime seems to be the fated reason why particular powers were given to Sparrow women:
  • Rosemary Sparrow could reportedly run faster than a deer, which let her warn a group of soldiers during The American Revolution before they were ambushed by the British.
  • Leonie Sparrow was Immune to Fire, which let her save the town's teahouse when Unity was set ablaze.
  • Contance Sparrow could stay under water indefinitely, which let her save her husband from drowning when his ship was wrecked.
  • Coral Sparrow could predict the weather, which let her evacuate half the town during a particularly devastating hurricane.
  • Elisabeth Sparrow could make delicious food out of anything, which helped her feed the men who came to Unity to build the train station.
  • Amelia Sparrow could ease the pain of pregnancy, which let her save the life of Eli Hathaway during his birth, which turns out to be vital to the story's plot.
• Tragically Damaged Tree: The old oak tree in town is known to be over three centuries old, originally part of the old growth forest that was cut down around it, but is now dying and becoming a danger, so Matt Avery is hired to cut it down piece by piece. It also houses a massive beehive since time immemorial. The last branch that Matt plans to cut down ends up falling and killing the murderer. Since the rest of the tree starts growing leaves again, it's decided to leave it standing.
• Thriller: The story starts with a young women who has recently learned she can foresee how some people will die noticing that a woman is going to be murdered, and her attempt to prevent this causes her to have to leave her home for her own safety as the murderer pursues her, intent on killing the last person who was a witness to his crime. The climax of the book involves the murderer catching up to her on Hourglass Lake, the lake haunted by a drowned horse and her own drowned ancestor, Rebecca, and trying to murder her then and there.
• Unhappy Medium:
  • When Stella first learns she can see how certain people will die, she passes out. For a long time she feels burdened by the knowledge, though when she learns that these deaths can be prevented if she acts on her knowledge, she feels a lot better about it and decides to go into medicine.
  • Jenny can see nearby people's dreams when she sleeps. She lives in an apartment building and has to endure the dreams of all its inhabitants, including the sexually explicit dreams of an upstairs neighbour. She also sees the dreams of her daughter, Stella, and her acting on the secret knowledge in order to care for her is part of why there's a rift between them.
  • Elinor can tell when people lie, which has helped cause her to become quite a misanthrope.
• Unholy Ground: Hourglass Lake is considered haunted by the drowned horse that belonged to Charles Hathaway, which threw him off, breaking his neck in the process, then ran into the lake.
• Virtuous Bees:
  • To the people like Matt who aren't afraid of them and are calm around them, the bees in the old oak tree in Unity are completely harmless.
  • When Jenny, as a child, cursed her mother Elinor's garden, she made the bees leave and thereby caused nothing to grow. Together they coax the bees back by offering them cake.
  • The dream Jenny sees on her thirteenth birthday includes a man who holds a bee in his hand without being stung. This dream is what made her fall in love with Will, believing it to be his dream. It was actually his brother Matt's dream. Matt is unafraid of bees and can handle them fine, while Will is allergic and deathly afraid of them.
• War Memorial: Unity has two, one for the American Revolution, which features an Angel and a list of the soldiers from Unity who died, and one for the American Civil War, which features a horse with a soldier riding it, who few people know is modeled after the Simon Hathaway's (who was the mayor when the stature was commissioned) own son Anton.
• Wicked Witch: What the Sparrow women are often suspected as being. Rumors of pins stuck in onions placed where the victim would find them, meant to curse the present and future, persist to the modern day. And this belief is what killed Rebecca Sparrow.
• Witch Hunt: When a plague struck Unity in the 17th century, the townsfolk of Unity blamed it on Rebecca Sparrow, which led to her death by drowning. The first person to accuse her was Mary Hathaway, the widow of Samuel Hathaway, who was Rebecca's lover and childhood best friend and the first to die. Rebecca's death drove Charles Hathaway (who was Samuel's father and who had adopted Rebecca for a time before casting her out) mad. Rebecca and Samuel's daughter Sarah was adopted by the Hathaways.