‘Fates and Furies’: Marriage’s flip sides
Modernday heroic Lancelot meets his match in melancholy
Two beautiful people meet in college. They have their own sorts of glamour: Lotto (short for Lancelot) is full of passion and charisma, destined for artistic greatness. Mathilde is cool and melancholy.
In the first half of her absorbing new novel, Lauren Groff allows Lotto to take center stage, as we follow the couple from shotgun marriage to bohemian beginnings to Lotto’s eventual success as a playwright. Fates
and Furies sprawls as it goes, but any potential sluggishness is warded off by Groff’s powerful and exotic prose, which renders majestic even the most familiar moments of everyday life. (“He looked inside the apartment through the window, where the phone persisted unringing on the mantel.”)
In the novel’s first half, Groff paints a convincing portrait of a male genius who perceives himself as heroically individual, prone to forget that his artistic confidence is the joint product of an adoring mother and a devoted wife. Eventually, he comes to see the fullness of his wife — and the realization isn’t welcome. “For twentythree years, he’d thought he’d met a girl who was as pure as snow, a sad, lonely girl. He had saved her. Two weeks later, they were married. But, like a squid from the deep, the story
had turned itself inside out.”
The second half of the novel switches viewpoint to the partner who is “quiet, watchful.” In order to bring Mathilde fully into focus, Groff ( Arcadia, The
Monsters of Templeton) jumps us through time, replaying and recasting much of the tale she established in the first half. The Mathilde who emerges is far more empowered than the wan and doting wife Lotto thought he knew. She can be ruthless, even cruel, and though her love for Lotto is absorbing and undeniable, “the sum of her life, she saw, was far greater than its sum of love.”
For the most part, Groff’s writing is striking and revelatory, taking on levels of mythic resonance appropriate to the grandeur of this godkissed relationship. Sometimes she overplays her hand, and her prose feels strained and overly loud, like a gifted singer belting out every note because she can.
Some readers may roll their eyes at a modern character named Lancelot — and in these pages, too, there is a Gawain and a Roland and a dog named God. Fates and Furies can seem out to make an impression first and tell a good story second, but if occasional affectation is the cost of such ambition, it was worth the gamble. Eliot Schrefer is the author of “Threatened,” a 2014 National Book Award Finalist.