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 Girl, 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.
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff [William Heineman, £14.99]. To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
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Credit...Anthony Russo
- Sept. 8, 2015
There’s always the danger, with novels structured around a marriage, that they’ll be perceived as centrally concerned not only with that particular relationship but with the nature of marriage itself. A domestic union set prominently in a work of fiction has the sometimes unfortunate capacity to obscure whatever else is going on. Yet “Fates and Furies,” Lauren Groff’s remarkable new novel, explodes and rages past any such preconceptions, insisting that the examination of a long-term relationship can be a perfect vehicle for exploring no less than the nature of existence — the domestic a doorway to the philosophical.
The title sets the tone for this project, while also serving as a road map of sorts. The novel is divided into two sections, the first of which, “Fates,” is largely concerned with the husband, Lancelot [Lotto] Satterwhite, an unconventionally irresistible beacon of good will and good faith — and more than a bit of a narcissist. The opening lines introduce us both to him and to his wife, Mathilde Yoder, but we are soon told: “For now, he’s the one we can’t look away from. He is the shining one.”
Wordplay abounds in “Fates and Furies,” starting with Lotto’s name and its link to such chance-related activities as lotteries. He’s the central character explicitly associated with fate and destiny, and as such he’s the more passive, the more accepting of the pair. And why not? From the beginning, fate seems to look on him with benevolence. His parents and his aunt, a crucial figure throughout, believe from Lotto’s birth that he’s destined for greatness: “It was taken for granted by this trio of adults that Lotto was special. Golden.” And indeed, despite some setbacks — including not being particularly gifted at his first career of choice, acting — he goes on to achieve world fame as a playwright.
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Lauren GroffCredit...Megan Brown
Still, Lotto’s life isn’t perfect, his optimism not always justified. An early tragedy primes him, the golden one, to need Mathilde, a woman as canny as he is trusting, as comfortable behind the scenes as he is in the spotlight, and as dissembling as he is a [mostly] open book.
The second section of the novel, “Furies,” shifts to Mathilde. Her life has never been defined by a sense of glorious destiny but rather by a compulsion to even the score, any score, many scores. As with Lotto, there is a tragedy in her deep past, but in her case fate alone cannot be blamed, and the fallout from that fact sets her on a ruthless path — though an unnervingly steady one, at times. The equanimity with which the young Mathilde inflicts physical pain on her peers is chilling. After pinching the face of a mocking schoolmate, “she watched as, over the course of the hour, twin purple grapes developed on his cheek. She wanted to suck them.” In later years, while she is capable of love — her devotion to her husband is consuming and real — she isn’t notably softened by that emotion in any essential way.
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What happens at the end of the fates and furies?
At the novel's conclusion, Mathilde must come to terms not only with Lotto's past but also with her own. She decides to tell Land that Chollie is his uncle. She reckons with the fact that there had been no forgiveness for her as child, and that this was wrong.
What is the difference between fates and furies?
Essentially, the man's view of things [a section titled “Fates”] is happy, open, naïvely victorious, and complacent; the woman's [“Furies”] is secretive, damaged, less happy, and, accordingly, much less complacent.
What is the summary of the fates and furies?
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].
Is Fates and Furies a movie?
Fates & Furies [Korean: 운명과 분노; RR: Unmyeonggwa Bunno] is a South Korean television series starring Lee Min-jung, Joo Sang-wook, So Yi-hyun and Lee Ki-woo.