Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff
Riverhead Books
Review by Claudia Wilde
Lauren Groff’s novel, Fates and Furies, is the first novel I was compelled to finish based almost solely off my fondness for the language. Never mind the story. (Which, by the way, is brilliant in its own right. I will get to this shortly.) Groff’s prose reads like poetry and the diction is precise, sticking to the tongue when spoken aloud:
He could die right now of happiness. In a vision, he saw the sea rising up to suck them in, tonguing off their flesh and rolling their bones over its coral molars in the deep. If she was beside him, he thought, he would float out singing.
The novel follows two narratives over the course of an apparently glamorous marriage. The first half, Fates, tells the story of the marriage through Lotto’s point of view. The tone of Fates is cheerful, victorious, and naively self-consumed. Mathilde is a beautiful peripheral character in the wake of Lotto’s blossoming career as a successful playwright. We learn about Lotto’s brilliant and restless upbringing. We learn of his wealth. The second half, however, Furies, is self-limiting, secretive, and tells the story of a stagnant and silent Mathilde, from birth until present. We learn about her marginal line of work, her turbulent inner world. How she really views Lotto.
In the division of two points of view we not only recognize Lotto’s lack of interest in Mathilde’s past and inner world but are able to sympathize with Mathilde. The tonal shift is shocking and mirrors the expansion and contraction that happens in many ‘successful’ relationships. Lotto is initially drawn to Mathilde for her saint-like qualities. This is a common patriarchal gesture: the celebration of the small woman. She asks for very little, speaks very little, is physically little, and puts aside her own career goals in order for Lotto to attain his. In Furies we begin to understand the roots of Mathilde’s desire to cater to the men around her and we watch as this poisons both her and their relationship.
The piece is interwoven with bracketed narrative excerpts which serve as the peanut gallery, the judgement. The checks and balances of the piece. If exploring the power imbalance within the modern heterosexual relationship isn’t enough, the bracketed excerpts go on to further explore judgment and power at a more minute level.
She was up for fall break, had pierced her ears all the way around, and wore her hair long in front, shaved in the rear. Radical for a ten-year-old, but she needed to do something, otherwise she looked a slight six with jittery hands, and from her studies of her cohort, she understood that it was better to be weird than twee. [Smart girl. Yes.]
Neither Lotto nor Mathilde are ever demonized as we watch the unravelling of their relationship. In fact, by the end, both Lotto and Mathilde are equally justified in their actions, they are both celebrated and condemned, magnified and shrunk, as we get closer to both characters and their relationship. It is in this way that Groff sharply explores the domestic patriarchy in a way that is neither patronizing nor didactic.
Claudia Wilde is a creative writing student at UBC and the creator of the intersectional feminist literary space, Daughters of Didion. Follow the walking volcano on Instagram: @clawdeeeeah.