Secrets and Lies

~ Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff ~

A beautiful young couple walk along a New England beach. They had secretly married that morning, and are focused entirely on each other. They make love in the dunes.

He longed for something wordless and potent: what? To wear her. He imagined living in her warmth forever. People in his life had fallen away like dominoes: every movement pinned her further so that she could not abandon him. He imagined a lifetime of screwing on the beach until they were one of those ancient pairs speed-walking in the morning, skin like lacquered walnut meat. Even old, he would waltz her into the dunes and have his way with her sexy frail bird bones, the plastic hips, the bionic knee.

Fates and Furies follows this couple over decades and dissects their relationship with a cold, precise, scalpel. Their names are Lotto and Mathilde: this novel, set in America, has no Emilys or Jennifers or Bills or Mikes. ‘Lotto’ is short for Lancelot, and his parents are Gawain and Antoinette. It is almost startling when Lotto’s aunt is merely named Sallie.

Lotto is beloved, precious to his parents and aunt, a golden child, charming and pleasing to all.

He would have been bright, ordinary, if his years continued so. One more privileged kid with his regular kid sorrows.

But one day his father has a stroke and dies, leaving behind a pregnant wife and Lotto, 12 years old. Rachel is born, Antoinette falls into depression and painkiller addiction and grows fatter and fatter, and Lotto’s face breaks out into cystic acne (“no longer a beautiful boy”). She sells the mansion and they move into a small house in a new neighbourhood, where Lotto meets Gwennie (Gwendolyn) and her brother Chollie (Charles).

The very next night it all ended.

Lotto, after the crisis, is sent to boarding school in New England. Years later, in college, he meets Mathilde, and the first half of the book follows their married lives, jumping years between chapters and sections of chapters. This can be rather disorienting for the reader, but the writing is interesting enough to hold one’s interest.

Lotto is a struggling writer, and Mathilde is supporting them with her job in an art gallery. Suddenly one night, in a drunken spasm, he writes a truly brilliant play, and his career catches fire. Their lives improve: house in the country, famous friends. Lotto remains happy, whether in poverty or wealth.

The novel is interspersed with sections from Lotto’s plays, and these can be both tedious and distracting. To me they smacked of literary pretension, but perhaps are more meaningful to those with a classical education?

Throughout this first section, though, there are hints that we are only hearing part of the story. Then the second section of the novel, Furies, begins, and the reader realizes that there is a whole other story to be told: Mathilde’s. In Fates she was the beautiful, quiet, introverted, perfect helpmeet, but in Furies her past and inner life are on display: considerably more dramatic, and perhaps somewhat melodramatic.

Time, to a four-year-old, is flood or eddy. Months, perhaps. Years, it’s not impossible. The darkness in her circled, landed. In her mind’s eye, her parents’ faces turned to twin smears. Was there a moustache atop her father’s lip? Was her mother bright blond or dark? She forgot the smell of the farmhouse where she’d been born, the crunch of gravel under her shoes, the perpetual twilight in the kitchen even when the lights were on. The wolf spun, settled in her chest, snored there.

To me, that last sentence is unnecessarily dramatic and takes away from the evocative earlier sentences. ‘The wolf’ almost seems to come from a different book. But that is the nature of Groff’s writing: just when you think you have a sense of the novel, there is a sentence or paragraph or plot twist that makes you think again.

Mathilde is by far the more complicated character, and Lotto’s simplicity is even starker in contrast. Furies is therefore the more interesting half of the book, despite its sometimes preposterous plot. A slightly more balanced couple might have made for a more interesting complexity in the novel.

In a novel about relationships, it is not unexpected that sex plays a major part, but the centrality of sex to this particular novel cannot be overstated. Lotto, with teenage acne or not, has a plentiful sex life in college. (“His roommates couldn’t believe the parade of girls.”) Mathilde, apparently virginal and remote in college, has an, um, unusual sex life. The changes in Lotto and Mathilde’s relationship over the years are underscored by the changes in the style and frequency of intercourse. Their marital life is bookended by their individual sexual relationships with others.

It’s not easy to find words to describe Groff’s writing style, but here are some: jagged, eyecatching, sometimes excessively overwrought, allegorical, interestingly picturesque, clever, original, ostentatious.

Take away the periodic excessiveness in the plot and writing, and Groff still has thought-provoking things to say about deception and relationships.

Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.

This is the first Groff novel I have read, and I will look out for her others.