Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff Fates and Furies. Lauren Groff explored the strengths of community in her first two novels, The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia . In Fates and Furies , she narrows her focus to the ultimate microcosm: a marriage. Told in two parts, first by a husband and then a wife, this unsettling novel looks at the myriad ways even the most devoted of couples keep secrets, betray one another and risk deceiving themselves. Despite the allusions to epic myth and Greek tragedy, Fates and Furies opens like a fairy tale: with a marriage between a prince and princess. Handsome, charismatic Lancelot, known as Lotto, meets the palely beautiful Mathilde in college, and after a brief courtship, they marry. “Fates”— the first half of the novel—tells the story of Lotto’s affluent upbringing in Florida, his failed acting career and years of genteel poverty with Mathilde in their Village apartment. Estranged from his mother and drinking heavily, Lotto finds unexpected success as a playwright. The second half of the novel, aptly named “Furies,” tells Matilde’s considerably grimmer side of the story. From Mathilde’s perspective, Lotto is lazy and self-absorbed, the selfish son of an indulgent yet withholding mother. For Mathilde, family life means keeping Lotto content—but at the cost of holding on to some very closely guarded secrets of her own. What begins as the story of their union unravels into something else altogether. In a novel whose title invokes the grand sweep of an epic, there shouldn’t be any surprise when the domestic tale leaps into mythic territory: bouts of hubris, betrayal and thwarted power that spring from the pages of classical tragedies. At times, Groff’s characters, with their selfishness, lust and need for revenge, are more archetypal than living, breathing people. But Mathilde’s rage is as artful as it is destructive, and at its deepest, Fates and Furies suggests that her vengeance is a creative force as carefully wrought as any of Lotto’s dramas. Fates and Furies is an ambitious and sometimes difficult novel about two charismatic people who, thrust out of the comforting nests of their birth families, seek security and solace in one another. Groff’s writing is intelligent, knowing and deliciously sexy. When Groff’s red-hot prose ignites Mathilde’s icy rage, Fates and Furies is something very special indeed. This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook. Why Fates and Furies was this year’s most talked-about novel. T o qualify as the US book of the year – that ineffable title to which Lauren Groff’s third novel, Fates and Furies , lays persuasive claim – a novel needs more than just blockbuster sales. In fact, the book that “everybody” seems to be reading often climbs no higher than a respectable but unspectacular slot on the bestseller list. Still, people talk about it. Celebrities such as Sarah Jessica Parker, Carrie Brownstein and Miranda July are pictured on Instagram with it. Critics love it, or – even better – debate its merits. Not only has Groff’s novel, by the Wall Street Journal’s count, landed on more US year-end best-of lists than any other work of fiction, but Amazon has made it official, stamping its endorsement on Fates and Furies as the retailer’s book of the year. The cherry on the top came from Barack Obama, who earlier this month told People magazine he liked Fates and Furies more than anything else he’d read in 2015. True, far more people bought the UK equivalent, Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train , than Fates and Furies in 2015, but they talked about it less enthusiastically. The Girl on the Train , like a reduced-calorie substitute, numbed the hunger the reading public feels for more thrillers along the lines of Gillian Flynn’s brilliant, genre-busting Gone Girl , yet it doesn’t truly satisfy the craving. Fates and Furies , while decidedly a work of literary fiction, doesn’t just resemble Gone Girl in a few key respects; it comes much closer than The Girl on the Train to offering the same leery take on the state of modern matrimony. Like Gone Girl , Fates and Furies is about a marriage in which each partner has a radically disparate view, not just of their union, but of the type of narrative constituted by their lives. It’s as if husband and wife each inhabit a different novel, in a different genre – one sunnily domestic, the other gothic. And in fact, they almost did: Groff has said that she originally wanted to publish Fates and Furies as two separate books. The novel tells the story of Lotto and Mathilde Satterwhite. He is the darling of a prosperous Florida family – “Lotto was special. Golden”. She, an apparent “ice princess”, is the survivor of a past about which her husband has only the fuzziest idea beyond it being “sad and dark”, and above all “blank behind her”. The first half of the book offers Lotto’s view of their life together as he rises from charming but failed actor to celebrated playwright, thanks in no small part to Mathilde’s editorial finesse. The second half reveals that Mathilde has, through implacable willpower, transcended circumstances that read like a hotchpotch of Greek tragedy, fable and detective novel. Much of what Lotto takes for granted in his good fortune, it turns out, is due to Mathilde’s ruthless machination, right down to their marriage itself. She genuinely loves him, but she initially set out to win him for mercenary reasons. On the surface, this premise echoes the familiar observation that even two people who live together intimately can end up feeling they hardly know each other. Given that most fiction is read by women, and that the purchase of a hardcover novel suggests a certain midlife affluence, it’s hardly surprising that so many book buyers would find this theme arresting and easy to relate to. They are at that point in life when they realise that a wedding is less the end of a fairytale than the beginning of a mystery, and sometimes an ugly one. This, in itself, isn’t new; a popular premise in suspense fiction has a new widow making the nasty discovery that her late husband led a secret life. But Fates and Furies , like Gone Girl , wrenches the old wronged-woman formula out of joint. These are both tales of female puppet masters, geniuses who invisibly engineer their marriages to appear to best advantage to outsiders – and, in the case of Groff’s novel, to the husband himself. Amy Dunne does it to take revenge, to bring the hapless Nick to heel and to consolidate her power over him. Mathilde does it to preserve the security she has sought all her life and to protect Lotto from ever knowing “the scope of her darkness”. Each woman is far cleverer than her spouse. Amy’s scheme is outlandishly criminal, while Mathilde’s is mostly just patronising. The good husbands in Victorian novels sheltered their wives from the world’s harshness, but now the roles are reversed. As exaggerated as they are, Amy and Mathilde resemble every working mum who wonders if her husband has any notion of how much effort she puts into the administration of their family life. That includes not just the serious stuff such as the kids’ healthcare and schools, but social labour on everything from birthday celebrations and the coordination of dinner parties to holiday plans. She schedules and organises; he blithely assumes it all just happens. She shakes her head and, in her rare free hours, she curls up with a copy of Fates and Furies . All of which makes President Obama’s admiration for the novel intriguing. If he were eligible to run for another term, the choice might be written off as a bid to ingratiate himself with female voters of the bookish persuasion. But I think not. The leader of the free world is, after all, famously uxorious, and the brilliance, organisational and otherwise, of Michelle Obama is a secret to no one, not even her husband. Her favourite book of 2015, by the way, was Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World , the memoir of a poet whose husband died suddenly aged 50. If they were characters in a novel by Groff or Flynn, that would be a little worrying. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff review - a marriage seen from two sides. I t starts with honeymoon sex on a cold New England beach, and ends with lonely old age in London decades later. Lauren Groff’s fat novel Fates and Furies is the portrait of a marriage, seen from both sides: first his, then hers. Groff lives in Florida and the early section describing Lotto’s youth in her home state has a magic-realist flavour. This golden boy, or “shining one”, born in a hurricane, is adored by his parents and aunt until death intrudes, his mother metamorphoses from mermaid to beached whale, and he starts to drink and take drugs with the wrong crowd. An accident on the beach, a first experience of sex that makes him think of “mangoes, split papayas, fruits tart and sweet and dripping with juice”, and Lotto’s wayward, tropical youth is brought to an abrupt halt by his banishment to a boarding school in New England. A chilly, lonely spell is broken by more sex and admission to Vassar liberal arts college, where Lotto discovers acting and his future wife, Mathilde, at a party: “He felt the drama of the scene. Also, how many people were watching them, how beautiful he and Mathilde looked together. In a moment, he’d been made new. His past was gone. He fell to his knees and took Mathilde’s hands to press them on his heart. He shouted up at her, ‘Marry me!’” Of course this is meant to be stagey. Lotto is an actor (he will soon fail, and discover his gift for writing). But their first meeting sets the tone of a relationship that never feels fully inhabited by Groff, or accessible to her reader. The novel makes much of the dream couple’s good looks, energetic sex life and fidelity; none of this compensates for their lack of emotional intimacy. It all makes more sense in the novel’s second half, when we discover just how much Mathilde has been hiding. But whereas Lotto’s childhood was full of the vivid sense-impressions typical of early memories, Mathilde’s biography feels cheap as well as cruel. Groff layers on the trauma so thick as to be implausible: formative events include the violent death of a sibling and abandonment by her parents, followed by years in the care of a French grandmother who is a prostitute and an uncle who is a crime boss with a Van Eyck masterpiece in a cupboard. From there, it’s only a short hop to New York, where she is robbed of her virginity by a sadistic aesthete – another cliche. The scene of her initiation is simply revolting: “Nobody likes what I’m about to do to you at first,” he said. “You need to fantasize to make it work. Stay with it.” Groff, inexplicably, makes Mathilde have an orgasm. In the midst of all this is Lotto’s supposedly brilliant career as a playwright, with long excerpts from several deeply dull plays inserted in the novel. Fates and Furies , like Gillian Flynn’s bestseller Gone Gir l, pivots on the shift in point of view. Everything we thought we knew in the first half comes undone in the second. There is a riddle around Mathilde’s fertility and a bigger one about her deepest nature: is she good or evil? The narrator either doesn’t know or has decided not to tell us, since key facts are left hazy. But the level of dishonesty in an ostensibly solid marriage is, to me, impossible to believe in. The trail of corpses, including that of a tormented genius composer, is lurid. The private detective who pops up in the book’s latter stages seems to have walked in from a cartoon. The style, combining hard-boiled four-word sentences with abstract musings, jarred. Groff is a manipulator of information, who controls what the reader understands in a novel that is all about narration. She won high praise for a volume of short stories and two previous novels. Here, she has Mathilde express what is surely her own hankering for a “messier, sharper” fiction. Perhaps others will find more to admire than I did in this strange mashup of literary and pulp fiction. A Dreamy Marriage Turns To Rage In 'Fates And Furies' "Oh, yes, you'd return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the Eastern Seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You're unworthy of her [Yes.[No.]] Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky." And that, my friends, is Lauren Groff. Some of the last lines of Part 1 of her new novel, Fates And Furies . The best lines? Nope. They are all (or almost all) best lines. The book is a master class in best lines; a shining, rare example of that most unforgiving and brutal writer's advice: All you have to do is write the best sentence you've ever written. Then 10,000 more of the best. Then find a way to string them together into the story of something. Which is what Groff has done here. And if you do want to learn how to be a great writer, you could do worse than skipping out on that M.F.A. program or pricey writer's retreat, dropping 28 bucks ($17-something on Amazon!) on this book, studying the hell out of it, and then spending all that money you just saved on gin cocktails and hats. It's that good. That beautiful. Occasionally, that stunning. Fates And Furies is the story of a marriage. Not of every marriage (as so many of today's novels-about-marriage attempt to be), but just about the one — Lotto and Mathilde. It is a split narrative, first Lotto's version of events (Fates), then Mathilde's (Furies). It goes that way because Lotto is the simpler of the two, the grander, the more dramatic — the one whom fate (and the fortune of being born into wealth and privilege) had graced. It goes that way because Mathilde operates behind the scenes and in the shadows, keeps most of the secrets, and all of the worst ones. Because it is Lotto's version of Mathilde we must see first in order to understand Mathilde's version of Lotto. The half-and-half narration could've failed terribly if Groff hadn't had it in her to do the hard thing — which is not to just tell two versions of the same story, but two completely different stories that happen to contain some of the same details. But she did. A long marriage isn't just about two people remembering things differently, she says with her choices. It's about two people remembering entirely different things, inhabiting entirely different worlds. Lotto (short for Lancelot, natch) remembers asking Mathilde to marry him (the first words he ever says to her) and her saying yes and then some dates and stuff happening, and then them having sex for the first time. Mathilde recalls saying no to his proposal, waking fully clothed beside him the next morning, and the way he slept with his fists balled beneath his chin. Lotto remembers their first apartment, a basement in Manhattan, and how happy they were there. Mathilde remembers the secret lengths she went to in order to pay the bills, all the rice and beans they ate for dinner, the terrible sacrifices, hard choices, misery. Lotto remembers being an actor. Mathilde remembers him failing. The voice that tells Lotto's half of the tale is dreamy. Mathilde's is rougher, crueler. A Greek chorus chimes in now and then in snarky, bracketed asides, which work beautifully within the architectural construction of Groff's voice. The marriage (which comes fast upon that disputed proposal) follows a predictable path through the standard-issue minefield of all marriages, but the wonder is in seeing it in full, from two different sides. In seeing Lotto rise and fall and rise again, and in seeing what Mathilde did quietly, mostly furtively, to engineer these changes in fortune. In feeling how utterly convincing Lotto's version of events is right up until Mathilde takes the stage. Early on, Lotto's drama teacher asks the class what the difference is between comedy and tragedy. "Solemnity versus humor," someone says. "Gravity versus lightness." Wrong, says the teacher. There is no difference. "It's a question of perspective. . It simply depends on how you frame what you're seeing." By the end of Fates And Furies, we have seen both sides, maybe even all sides of Lotto and Mathilde. We've seen the man and the woman behind the man, borne witness to terrible truths brought forth for spite's sake and watched a dark turn to furious vengeance when Mathilde (suddenly, but not at all uncharacteristically) goes full Lady MacBeth and scorches the very earth. We know their secrets. We know their fears. We know what they did behind closed doors (and ones just slightly ajar). And yet still we are left with one lingering question. Do we close the book believing in the purity and genius of the fated son, or with nothing but a cold and lingering fury? Jason Sheehan is an ex-chef, a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book. The Bottom Line: 'Fates And Furies' By Lauren Groff. An older woman lazes in a bathtub, her legs splayed out before her in an X. She reflects back on her life -- the triumphs and disappointments, big and small -- and takes note that her trajectory, her timeline, has moved along in the shape of an X. Her youth was strange, tragic; her middle-age was thrilling, full of love; her final years had a vagueness to them rippling out from the exciting high-point. At the center of that X is her marriage, her source of meaning. Lauren Groff’s new novel, Fates and Furies , tells the story of that marriage from the vantage point of both parties: Mathilde, the beautiful, poised, reflective woman, and Lotto, her husband, a beaming, bearlike playwright who lives for the grandiose. The two meet at a cast party their senior year at Vassar, after a production of “Hamlet” Lotto starred in. The way Lotto tells it, he saw Mathilde from across the room, and, struck by her beauty, facetiously got down on one knee. To his dramatic inquiry, Mathilde shrugged, “Sure.” Mathilde let him believe his version of her story -- she prefers to see him happy than to force him to confront reality -- but she remembers it differently. Over the noise of the party, she laughingly turned down Lotto’s offer. Still, weeks later, they got married. And, years after the lightening-fast engagement, their initial infatuation sustained them through thwarted ambitions (Lotto’s, acting; Mathilde’s, art), tiffs with estranged family members, and disagreements about whether they should have children. The key to their success, according to Groff: secrets. When Lotto’s callous mother called Mathilde to bribe her into an annulment, she kept the biting scene to herself. When Lotto’s admiration for an artist colony colleague bubbled over into infatuation, he didn’t dare tell his wife. For better or for worse, Mathilde’s desire to quietly please -- making edits to Lotto’s plays in the night, ensuring that all bills and dishes are tidily done -- allowed their marriage to run smoothly. And Lotto’s ample gratitude, albeit muddied at times by arrogance, helped grease the machine. Groff is tuned into how old-fashioned this seems; at a playwriting conference, Lotto is attacked for his gender-normative approach to marriage. And his comfortable life, made easier by the women around him, is narrated by an omniscient chorus, chiming in clever asides, snarking about his naivety. While the portion of the book devoted to Lotto’s perspective has a Bard-like theatricality, Mathilde’s is slightly coarser, grittier, more realistic. Tasked with doing the behind-the-scenes dirty work of the marriage, she offers a more reliable viewpoint than Lotto’s. The reader learns of her secret motives and ambitions, and, after tragedy strikes, learns of the inner coping mechanisms hidden behind a composed exterior. Groff describes her as a sort of anti-Anna Karenina; hardened by loss, she grows tougher in her newfound independence. There’s humor in her approach to coping -- she slinks around the house naked, spending time with her dog named God -- just as there’s a touch of tragedy in Lotto’s jolly, bombastic demeanor. That’s Groff’s gift: imbuing each scene with subtle, duelling layers of emotion. The bottom line: A saga of secrets, Fates and Furies examines the conjoined perspectives that make up a mostly happy -- if at times tragic -- marital relationship. Who wrote it? Lauren Groff is the author of Arcadia and The Monsters of Templeton . She’s a finalist for the Orange Award for New Writers. Who will read it? Those interested in sprawling, epic stories, or stories about marital bliss or turmoil. Those interested in anything Shakespeare-adjacent. Opening lines: A thick drizzle from the sky, like a curtain’s sudden sweeping. The seabirds stopped their tuning, the ocean went mute. Houselights over the water dimmed to gray. Notable passage: Oh, yes, you’d return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the Eastern Seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You’re unworthy of her [Yes. [No.]]