Groff allows for further discrepancy with the use of bracketed narration, which riffs on and editorializes the story’s proceedings. There’s a sense that she isn’t wholly who Lotto believes her to be. Mathilde herself is vivid on the page, if somewhat enigmatic. In the book’s first half, the reader comes to know Lotto’s vanity and his confidence in the world as he has narrated it. If once or twice the poetry obfuscates rather than clarifies, it’s to be forgiven as with love, the exceptional is preferable to the mundane. Take this line, for instance, describing a pastoral view at dawn: “Hot milk of a world, with its skin of morning fog in the window.” The lyricism differentiates and elevates Lotto and Mathilde’s coupledom, and the reader leans in closer, to find out more. “Fates and Furies” further showcases this talent. In her previous work, including the 2012 novel “Arcadia,” Groff proved herself a deft prose stylist, translating the familiar into the remarkable and transcendent. Lotto sustains this certainty in their marriage, and in Mathilde, whom he sees as “the nexus of all the good of this world,” for almost the entire novel. It is Lotto’s unassailable confidence in their union that is most striking: “He could die right now of happiness,” Groff writes. In the first scene, he and Mathilde make love on the beach as a newly married couple. Mathilde is quiet and mysterious, without any close friends. It’s the tail end of their senior year at Vassar, and Lotto is the campus’ best actor and a popular ladies’ man. Our players, Lotto and Mathilde, marry in secret after a two-week courtship. Marriage isn’t always what it seems, even to those inside it. The result is not only deliciously voyeuristic but also wise on the simultaneous comforts and indignities of romantic partnership. “Fates and Furies,” Lauren Groff’s audacious and gorgeous third novel, offers readers such access by depicting over two decades between a husband and wife. Fiction, thankfully, lets us experience and learn from the lives of others.
A marriage is its own enclosed universe, and no one except the two people within it can know its complexities, from its wordless shorthand and built-up resentments to its ingrained loyalty and tenderness.īut that’s real life.
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