Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
I think I picked this up simply because I had heard Groff mentioned in book reviews as an interesting writer. I came to this book, therefore, with little knowledge except the mercenary one that this was one of her cheaper novels on Kindle.
I think this lack of expectations was, ultimately, one of the great pleasures of this book for me – the story kept wrong footing me and not fitting to any pattern I am familiar with in similar books that examine a relationship over several years. The relationship in question is between Lancelot Satterwhite (Lotto) and Mathilde who become a couple at the end of their college days. He is a handsome, charismatic only son from a wealthy family, the sort of person who others gravitate towards when he enters the room. Mathilde is more mysterious, she seems to have no back story, has worked diligently on her studies and has a physical presence that is hard to categorise – peers cannot decide whether she is beautiful or not but she has found work alongside her studies as a part time model. Lotto has no doubts about her beauty and sexual allure and their relationship is erotically charged. They are part of a set of energetic young people ready to make their mark in 1990s America; but there is no doubt that they are the golden couple.
The wrong footing I referred to is hardwired into the structure of the book – similar to Gillian Flynn’s ‘Gone Girl’ with its alternative narrative by the husband and wife protagonists; the first half here is seen from Lotto’s perspective and the final section from Mathilde’s. In that first section, we learn concisely about the early death of Lotto’s beloved father, the subsequent teenage high jinks which got him into trouble with the law leading to Lotto’s mother sending him to a strict boarding school, and then his sexually liberated years at college where he studies to become an actor. Some of those experiences could have soured his optimistic personality but do not. Lotto remains a loyal friend to many, someone with whom girls want to sleep and men party. When he and Mathilde come together in a rush of highly charged sexual abandon, the reader feels that he deserves the ecstatic happiness he derives from his love for her and yet we have a fearful anticipation that some disruptive moment of jeopardy must just be around the corner. And yet in the first quarter of the book this never comes, not when his mother cuts him off financially for what she considers his unsuitable relationship with Mathilde, nor as he struggles to secure well-remunerated acting work.
What I did enjoy in the account of the early years of their marriage in a small New York apartment, was the sense of giddy excitement and expectation that I remember from the first days of my married life with Sarah. We get well-observed social occasions with them and their friends sharing stories about their lives and burgeoning careers whilst indulging, just a little more cautiously, in the hedonisms of their college days. Yet we also get a sense of Mathilde quietly holding things together for the golden couple, creating an attractive, warm domestic base, and supporting Lotto financially with her work in an art gallery as well as emotionally encouraging his artistic endeavours.
It is at this point that one expects Lotto’s acting struggles, despite his talent, to impose strains on the marriage, and there are some dark moments: an accident and a drink-fuelled depression. There is then a gear shift as Lotto finds his true vocation as a successful playwright. Again, Mathilde brings the mystery: she fervently and persistently encourages his writing and yet we are never sure just how important her tidying up of his scripts really is – think Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce in the recent film ‘The Wife’.
Lotto enjoys, and I mean enjoys in its fullest sense, his critical and commercial success as an Arthur Miller-like playwright mixing classical themes and allusions with social realism. He and Mathilde become established even more as a golden couple but he retains his zest for life and loyalty to friends and she her air of mystery. There is an intense episode when Lotto becomes emotionally involved with a composer at an artists’ retreat with whom he is working on a modern opera; but, ultimately, this is just an interesting footnote in the examination of the Satterwhites’ marriage. And then the first half ends abruptly.
Most critics loved this book but those who didn’t, and I have to admit most common readers’ comments showed they were underwhelmed, focused their displeasure on this rather meandering narrative with its sharp turns of fortune. There was a feeling that it lacked a purposeful, connecting thread driving the narrative forward. This was, however, the very reason I loved the first half of the book: Groff confidently presents Lotto’s buoyant perspective as well as skilfully dipping into the stories of his friends and family as they grow through the years with him. It seemed to me an authentic and entertaining account of how a couple’s life together progresses sometimes by design and often more randomly.
And then we come to that second half and Mathilde’s story. Some of the reviews I have read provide spoilers but I am not going to say much more because I think that providing any hints of where the story goes will spoil the pleasures of Mathilde’s story. If you have got as far as the end of Lotto’s story then I am sure that you will want to carry on. Well okay… I’ll just make one comment about the final section and that is the pleasure I gained from getting inside Mathilde’s mind - she is prone to saying things that we often think but leave unsaid.
If you are tempted to read this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, then read some reviews other than mine because for a book that is incredibly readable it certainly divided the literary critics from the common reader.