With Lotto’s sudden ascendancy to fame as a playwright (after a failed acting career), the perfect couple is in the headlines, a cause celebre for a Broadway hitmaker who is positive that his wife was a virgin when he married her. Groff describes their attraction as beauty and abundance, and she spends many passages describing how Lotto and MathildeĪlmost float away “on their own current.” That love begun so powerfully eventually spreads luxuriously into everything. Her language and use of simile and metaphor sparkle with starkness-her heroine, Mathilde, both barren and plaintive, is at first driven by loyalty and lust for her husband, but because she is young, she’s unseasoned and uncertain and often speaks of a childhood overshadowed by abuse. Through Lotto and Mathilde, Groff infiltrates the world of Shakespearian drama and Greek tragedy with her own ideas about the nature of love, marriage, and age-old sexual attraction. With an ache in his gut, troubled and unhappy, Lotto recalls his childhood and Florida’s sunlight, “obscured in a blaze, impossible to see.” It doesn’t take long for Antoinette to pack recalcitrant Lotto off to a boarding school in the cold New Hampshire gloom. Lotto’s best friend, whose uncouthness, loneliness, and “innocent money hunger” remind Lotto of his father.
Lotto’s sorrow at losing his father is just one of many of the challenges that he will face in these early years, from the birth of his sister, Rachel, to his connection to Gwenie, the most interesting of his three new friends (readers should pay attention in these early sections as they have ramifications for later). In this tiny adult who is considered articulate and sunny, the world is revealed to itself. It is taken for granted that this child of privilege will be special and golden. The love of his life, yet it’s clear from the outset exactly how the road to love and hell will be paved.īegins with back story: in the humid landscapes of Central Florida, Lotto is born to Antoinette and Gawain. Lotto is quick to tell us that everything in his life has steadily built toward Mathilde, Where Lotto is “loud and full of light while Mathilde has a tendency to be “quiet and watchful.” Groff establishes “a unity marriage made of discrete parts” The marriage described is between Lotto and Mathilde, a fashionably, sexy couple who up until now have had a hurried and frantic courtship.
While the book won’t be for all tastes, the narrative has style that reflects the fleeting pleasures of a marriage, revealing the fractured years of secrets and regrets that remain behind when one partner is emotionally unavailable and the other has returned to the relative safety of New York City. Written with literary flare, Groff’s Fates and Furies might well be the year’s most ambitious novel. Book review: Lauren Groff's *Fates and Furies*
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