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Arcadia Paperback – Bargain Price, October 2, 2012
"Timeless and vast... The raw beauty of Ms. Groff’s prose is one of the best things about Arcadia. But it is by no means this book’s only kind of splendor." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Even the most incidental details vibrate with life � Arcadia wends a harrowing path back to a fragile, lovely place you can believe in." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post
In the fields of western New York State in the 1970s, a few dozen idealists set out to live off the land, founding a commune centered on the grounds of a decaying mansion called Arcadia House. Arcadia follows this romantic utopian dream from its hopeful start through its heyday. Arcadia’s inhabitants include Handy, the charismatic leader; his wife, Astrid, a midwife; Abe, a master carpenter; Hannah, a baker and historian; and Abe and Hannah’s only child, Bit. While Arcadia rises and falls, Bit, too, ages and changes. He falls in love with Helle, Handy’s lovely, troubled daughter. And eventually he must face the world beyond Arcadia.
In Arcadia, Groff displays her literary gifts to stunning effect.
"Fascinating." --People (****)
"It’s not possible to write any better without showing off." --Richard Russo, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls
"Dazzling." --Vogue
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVoice
- Publication dateOctober 2, 2012
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions5.19 x 8 inches
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Product details
- ASIN : B00CVDMDOU
- Publisher : Voice (October 2, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 8 inches
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About the author

Lauren Groff is the author of five novels: THE VASTER WILDS, forthcoming in September 2023, and two National Book Award Finalists, MATRIX and FATES AND FURIES; as well as ARCADIA and THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON. Her story collections include FLORIDA, winner of The Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and DELICATE EDIBLE BIRDS. She has been twice been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, as well as for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the Orange Prize for New Writers. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and was named one of Granta's 2017 Best Young American Novelists. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's, in seven Best American Short Stories anthologies. Her books have been published in over 30 languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.
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Lauren Groff's prose, at its best is breathy and luminous. The early part of the novel is told from a very young child's perspective, though not precisely in a child's voice. The result is a sense, almost, of magical realism. Very serious and adult behaviors and conversations are seen through the lens of love and childish normalcy, sometimes allowing the reader a great deal of dramatic irony--you know that some troubling things are afoot, but young Bit does not.
Those who enjoy lush description and an unhurried pace will love especially the first part of the novel, those parts that happen during Bit's childhood. Props also for several plot choices that build a great deal of tension, enough to balance the moments of slow reveal, in this reader's opinion.
There is so much about the communal life that Groff got right, that it is stunning to find that she is barely a blink above thirty. Having lived that life myself, I can say that these characters and their circumstances really aren't so stereotypical as one might imagine. I did feel from time to time that the author probably owes a debt of gratitude to work such as TC Boyle's Drop City and that wonderful counterculture classic Spiritual Midwifery (for example, the midwives of Arcadia referring to uterine contractions as "rushes"). In the end, though, Groff most certainly distilled her sources and made them, abundantly, her own.
Just a few things dropped this novel out of the 5 star category for me, and not by much. One was a credibility problem with a commune functioning at this level for such a long time--into the early 1980s. There were enough seeds of human error sown (as there are in any such utopian endeavor) early on that I found it hard to believe that the same people would have held together for such a long time before the bottom dropped out. I felt that this time frame was somewhat forced on the author by her choice to end the narrative in the year 2018, with a middle-aged Bit and his return-of-sorts to Arcadia. I also was ambivalent with the choice to have a dystopian health crisis make such a noted appearance, to little actual effect. Finally, a minor and probably finicky loose-thread question: Why create that improbable and fascinating underground emergency tunnel between Arcadia House and the Octagonal Barn, and then allow it to drop out of the story almost completely?
I sank into Arcadia and lived in it without coming up for air, and came away moved by its beauty and imagination, and beset with thoughts about days long gone, and how we move forward on our brief journeys by loving one another. A wonderful read.
I've had ARCADIA on my Kindle for months, putting it off for a time when I was in the mood for something more thoughtful, something that required my attention, and when I finally picked it up this week, ready to immerse myself in its poetic prose, oh, what a gift I gave myself!
Revolving around the "hippie commune" of Arcadia in western New York in the late 60s, it is a poignant, redolent, visceral memory piece wrapped around the main character, Bit, a small boy who grows up in the commune until events demand that he and his family face the outside world. Through the eyes of this curious, enduring, and endearing character, we are given a tactile, almost textural experience of what growing up in such a setting entailed: the smells, sounds, feelings, sensations, to the point that you can almost taste the yeasty bread baked daily or smell the hot berries growing in the sun as he dashes by on some forest adventure.
The characters who fill the narrative, from adults who remind us of images we’ve seen of that time, to the children living by their wit and wonder, it is a story that is both non-judgmental in its rendering of that unique and memorable era, as well as a candid and unvarnished view of that history's impact on the lives and well-being of those involved.
If you are looking for fast-paced, page-turning plot lines, or extreme character twists and turns, this is not your book. But if the notion of fully experiencing a seminal moment in history via another person's journey through that time pricks your interest, you will be deeply moved by this story. The profound relationships that stretch throughout Bit's life, the attachments, love, memories; heartaches, life-changing perceptions, all conspire to bring the reader into the WHOLE of the experience...
...to the point that by the book's I was emotionally filled, teary-eyed and yearning, nostalgic and appreciative of the moments, large and small, in my own history, when a glance, a breath, a connection between people makes one realize how fragile and precious life is, how strong our emotional ties, how important to make note of ALL we surround ourselves by, immerse ourselves in, deem integral to who we are.
"Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gestures, but to the passing breath."
It is a beautiful ideal from an idealistic time. It remains a beautiful ideal, well expressed in a beautifully rendered book.
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We next find Bit in his early 40s teaching in a city college. To describe the story from there on - to its conclusion in 2018 -would spoil the plot really. However, the author makes the point that modern city living may be just as dystopian as the hopeless hippy dreams of the 1960s. The conclusion finds us and Bit back in Arcadia in a very different world. Maybe Arcadia still offers some answers.
The closest novel I can compare this with - if comparisons are valid in amazon reviews - would be TC Cooper's Drop City . So much of writing on the modern commune - non-fiction and fiction - offers the standard "nice idea, but" analysis. However, Lauren Groff does a bit more. She takes her characters into the real world and the big city, and back again. In the end Lauren Groff pleads a more balanced nuanced view.
Of course Arcadia has to succeed as a novel, as a good story and I did really like it. There are a number of characters who recur apart from Bit himself; the reader wants to know what happens to all the people we meet in the beginning. Each is explored both as a person contributing individually to the story. But Lauren Groff is also asking how can such people live together, what type of society works best. Does city living cause deviancy and crime and abuse? Does communal living cure it? Conversely does a commune without rules lead inevitably to dictatorship and abuse? I think the questions she asks are very material and explored well.
I imagine that many people will use this book to point out how experimental life styles always doomed. It would be terribly wrong to use this book in such a way. What this book provides is a long breath of details that awaken the beauty that there can be, even in the sorrow of failure. For me, the message lay in the fact that we cannot deny ourselves adventure. Failure is part of the beautiful journey.







