Written by Lauren Groff
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff is a big sprawling love story framed by Greek mythology. The first half, Fates, is told from the perspective of wife, Mathilde, and the second half, Furies, is from the perspective of her playwright husband Lotto. It is a match made in heaven, one that is furiously erotic, until Lotto dies young at 46, and then the book moves into its second act, and is told from Matilde’s point of view. I struggled to connect in the first part of the novel, wanting the book to move beyond its narrow focus on Lotto and Mathilde. Finally, in Furies, my interest was piqued when we start to learn of all Mathilde’s dark secrets Lotto never knew while he was alive. Matilde is a highly internal sort without any friends besides Lotto’s, and this tension mirrors the slow revelations that occur in the novel, as if we have to coax Matilde’s secrets to the surface, one by one. A third omniscient perspective is also revealed—that of authorial asides as in a Greek chorus. Playing with the Greek commands of her title, Groff crafts her protagonists who are sentenced by fate and charged with fury; they are heroic and doomed, modern and ancient, comic and tragic, dramatic and diminished. Groff crafts a new way to tell an old story, or as Mathilde herself says, “She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.”
The prose is brilliant, in its weaving of perspectives. Richer and more interesting is Groff’s unbracketed language, which is thrillingly good—precise, lyrical, rich, and unique. Young Lotto, seen cycling from a distance, is a “mantis on his bicycle”; a dog’s erection is “a tube of lipstick all the way extended.” The sound of a swimming pool—“the pool suckled at its gutters.” A lake is “poxed by the touch of scattered rain.” A bus, lowering itself to let people down, “knelt the passengers off like a carnival elephant.” Bubbles “flea-jump” out of the top of a champagne glass. Groff’s language is dazzling.
When in the book’s second half we become privy to Matilde’s history in a way that Lotto never was, we become complicit with the omniscient narrator and Matilde’s point of view, which is a thrilling place to be—when we as readers know the truth in a way that the chief protagonist doesn’t. Dramatic irony at its finest.
“With the gift came the bitter seed of regret, the unbridgeable gap between the Mathilde she was and the Mathilde he had seen her to be. A question, in the end of vision.”
A question of vision, which the entire novel seems to be about.