Formally, Lauren Groff’s new novel, “Fates and Furies” (Riverhead), resembles a bed that long marital use has unevenly depressed: it tells the story of an apparently successful marriage from two different perspectives, the husband’s and then the wife’s, and it explores the fierce asymmetry of the two tellings. Essentially, the man’s view of things (a section titled “Fates”) is happy, open, naïvely victorious, and complacent; the woman’s (“Furies”) is secretive, damaged, less happy, and, accordingly, much less complacent. The story’s form not only promises a stereoscopic account of the mythological monad that is marriage but holds the tempting possibility that the angrier second version might modify the easier first one, forcing it out of untruth with corrective revelation.
Lotto (short for Lancelot) and Mathilde meet at a party, near the end of their time as Vassar undergraduates. The attraction is intense, and they get quickly married, just before graduation. The relationship is puzzling to Lotto’s friends: he is a college god, blessed with charm, intelligence, and riches, strapping and handsome (six feet six), a rising young actor. Mathilde is mysterious. She seems to have no legible past, no obvious context. She had no friends at college, and is thought of as an “ice queen” or worse. She is glamorous, but people can’t decide whether she’s beautiful or “interesting-looking.” Temperamentally, the two seem opposed. Lotto thinks her “the purest person he’d ever met,” and later likens her to a saint. This is a characteristically patriarchal gesture: Mathilde seems to ask for little, and subsumes whatever desire for a career she may have had to his larger claims. But Lotto’s praise of her purity also has to do with the holy hygiene, the devoted erasure of Mathilde’s self-presentation. One morning, we are told, “it struck him hard that she had no family at all”:
This is as far as Lotto’s curiosity ever takes him, and it is all we hear, in the novel’s first section, about Mathilde’s origins. To Lotto (and to the reader, who sees Mathilde through Lotto’s eyes in this part), she is a successful American tabula rasa: her real life began, conveniently enough for him, when she met her husband.
The couple move to New York (it is the early nineteen-nineties). They are poor (he has been cut off from the family wealth, a penalty for his spousal choice) but happy, heroically bohemian, erotically enchanted with each other. During his twenties, Lotto struggles to make it as an actor, while Mathilde works at an art gallery, earning the regular money. Though naturally ebullient, Lotto, whose father used to say that he would become President or an astronaut, suffers from depression, and starts drinking. A reversal of fortune occurs on New Year’s Eve, 1999, when, in a kind of drunken trance, Lotto stays up all night and in five hours writes a play, “The Springs,” about his tempestuous family background. Mathilde wakes him to tell him that she has read it, that he has found his true talent, and that she has already started editing the manuscript. Lotto, lucky man, appears to remember nothing of his dusky labor. “The Springs” launches the literary career of Lancelot Satterwhite, who goes on to write a series of celebrated plays, emerging as one of the most distinguished dramatists of his day. Mathilde quits the art gallery, and they move to the country, where she keeps house and manages Lotto’s business interests. Thanks to his wife, Lotto never again scrubs a toilet or pays a bill, and smugly boasts—in public, on a literary panel—that his wife “gave up her job years ago to make mine run more smoothly. She loves to cook and clean and edit my work, it makes her happy to do these things.”
Groff is an original writer, whose books are daringly nonconformist; she has a sharp gift for mimesis, yet she also tends naturally toward imagining semi-autonomous worlds. Admirably, she writes inside and outside history at once, refusing to play safe by merely contouring the known. “Arcadia,” her previous novel, convincingly tells the life story of a boy who grows up in the early nineteen-seventies, in a commune in upstate New York. It follows his development all the way to 2018, as he leaves the community of his childhood and joins the larger world. The enclosed, utopian space of Arcadia, with its cultic leaders and its ragged freedoms, is brilliantly brought to life, the details absorbed by the restless, compound eye of an impressionable child. Likewise, “Fates and Furies” refuses to be a conventional domestic novel. Playing with the Greek commands of her title, Groff enlarges (and also reduces) her protagonists. They are sentenced by fate and charged with fury; they are heroic and doomed, modern and ancient, comic and tragic, dramatic and diminished. This tone, essentially mock-heroic, is extremely difficult to maintain, and it can’t be said that “Fates and Furies” finally succeeds in that maintenance. But the first part of the novel, at least, which glorifies and lays bare its golden hero, Lancelot Satterwhite, is consistently surprising and vital. The ornamented names tell us something at once: Lancelot may have been born in Florida, may be the wealthy heir of a water-bottling company named Hamlin Springs, but, with that name and a father called Gawain, he isn’t going to resemble many contemporary Floridians. Lotto’s life will be closer to some epic chanson than to the gray grammar of novelistic realism. His father dies when Lotto is young; it is his atrocious mother, Antoinette—never more than an operatic villain—who cuts off his inheritance when she discovers that he has married the inappropriate and enigmatic Mathilde. But Lotto triumphs anyway.
Groff sows her text with bracketed authorial interventions, in which she plays the role of omniscient Greek chorus, reminding us that she is measuring the thread for her invented spools. Lotto’s progress is regularly interrupted in this way. When he begins what will be a vigorous erotic career, our chorus murmurs, within square brackets, “[Lust! Old story renewed in young flesh.]” When he considers suicide but resists the notion, the author approves: “[True. It was not his time.]” Elsewhere, a minor character is awarded a Nabokovian flash-forward: “[Her death would be soon and sudden. Ski tumble; embolism.]”
Richer and more interesting is Groff’s unbracketed language, which is thrillingly good—precise, lyrical, rich, both worldly and epically transfiguring. Young Lotto, seen cycling from a distance, is a “mantis on his bicycle”; a dog’s erection is “a tube of lipstick all the way extended.” The sound of a swimming pool—“the pool suckled at its gutters.” A lake is “poxed by the touch of scattered rain.” A bus, lowering itself to let people down, “knelt the passengers off like a carnival elephant.” Bubbles “flea-jump” out of the top of a champagne glass. There are many more examples, on page after page. The prose is not only beautiful and vigorously alert; it insists on its own heroic registration, and lifts this story of a modern marriage out of the mundane. Even Lotto and Mathilde’s sex is grand and yet wittily figured: “his wife posting atop him like a prize equestrienne.” Groff mobilizes these stylistic talents to convey that tricky double sense of characters who (for all we know) may or may not be heroic but are certainly heroic in their own estimation.
So it is an enormous shame that the novel’s second half squanders in quick moments what was slowly accumulated in the first half’s careful pages. Reviewers get coy around narrative secrets: spoilers make them tongue-tied. You might imagine, from this novel’s shy reviews, that the second half of “Fates and Furies” functions as a kind of necessary reality check, in which the wife supplants the epic male vision with a more accurate and un-illusioned perspective. That is wanly true. Mathilde reflects on her invisibility as the wife of a famous writer, on Lotto’s egotistical complacency, on how she quietly rewrote half of his plays (“she would silently steal in at night and refine what he had written”). But these references seem halfhearted and novelistically gestural—we have to take on faith the assertion that Mathilde, like one of the mice in Beatrix Potter’s “The Tailor of Gloucester,” mended her husband’s work at nighttime, because the claim is never more plausibly or solidly rendered. The energy of the novel’s second half is not, in fact, torqued toward a furious corrective analysis of the married state. (Or even toward an unfurious one, which would doubtless be as interesting.) Disappointingly, this part of the book becomes a lurid fairy tale whose heroine is not so much furious as a Fury, not so much disillusioned as a Devil.
Beware: I’m unafraid to host a big spoiler party—a novel that can be truly “spoiled” by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot. At the end of the first section, Lotto dies. He is forty-six, the age of his father’s death. In Part 2, we turn to the story of glamorous and inaccessible Mathilde—who, we learn, was born in France, as Aurélie, her mother a fishwife in Nantes, her father a stonemason. When she is four, she effectively kills her brother (by smilingly encouraging him to fall down the stairs), and is banished by her parents: sent first to a chilly grandmother in Paris (where she sleeps in a closet for six years) and then, at the age of eleven, to a nasty uncle in Pennsylvania. This uncle informs her that he won’t often be at home, and that his driver will look after her needs. Alone, Aurélie learns English by watching TV and changes her name to Mathilde: “Like that, all at once, Mathilde grew up over Aurélie’s skin.” All the rooms in the house are locked, save for her bedroom. But one day the uncle accidentally leaves open a small room under the stairs, where Mathilde discovers a beautiful painting that turns out to be a stolen van Eyck. Later, Mathilde will—in short order—pay for her education at Vassar by prostituting herself to a wealthy art dealer; pay for the first performance of “The Springs” by blackmailing her uncle; get pregnant by Lotto and arrange an abortion (because she is convinced that her children will have fangs and claws). And there’s more: after her husband’s death, Mathilde will sleep with a handsome actor named Land, who will turn out to be Lotto’s son, conceived by his first girlfriend, in Florida, when she was seventeen and Lotto was only fifteen.
The point of this cruel outing is not merely to illuminate the heaped incredibilities (which awkwardly subsist within a broadly realist register); or only to suggest that Groff is flailing here, reaching for whatever motifs she can stuff into the vessel—Greek tragedy, “Bluebeard’s Castle” (locked rooms), “The Secret Garden” (horrid banished daughters), “Rumpelstiltskin” (erotic contracts). I find these melodramatic accelerations—“Like that, all at once, Mathilde grew up over Aurélie’s skin”—humanly untruthful (is that how it happens, like that, all at once?) and thus a kind of vandalism of the novel form. But tastes in unreality differ. The acute problem is not so much improbability as eccentricity. Mathilde never told Lotto about any of it (she “made a promise that he would never know the scope of her darkness”)—not the dead brother, or the French childhood, or the rewriting of his plays, or the abortion. The extremity of Mathilde’s suffering makes her repression of it less interesting than a more ordinary version of such self-control (she doesn’t really have a self, so its repression just makes her a double negative); and Lotto’s shortsighted complacency is also suddenly less interesting, because less culpable (we can’t usefully judge him for not knowing what was strenuously kept from him).
Thus the novel hobbles its power to speak of marriage in general. Indeed, far from telling us something suggestive about the desires, different and shared, of two genders, the rapidities and savageries of the second half run the risk of drowning gender in the purest essence of fable: the man belongs to the Fates, the woman (or “devil girl,” as she is called) to the Furies; if it was the man’s fate to have married a Fury—so this narrative logic seems to go—it is the woman’s fate to be a Fury.
The “revelation” of the novel’s second half, far from binding the form in meaning, is the thread that fatally unravels it. Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fated to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking. ♦
