FATES and FURIES – A Novel by LAUREN GROFF
The smell of rotten fiction smells even worse than rotten fish.
When I finally finished Lauren Groff’s immature, confused, pretentious fiction,
I thought I had “tragically” forgotten to empty last weeks trash. I had, not only a
sour, unpleasant taste in my mouth, but I was aware of a sudden urge to strip off
all my clothes, take a long hot shower and change into freshly laundered every-
things.
Ms Groff’s presumptuous claims to be a clever, experienced commentator on marriage
end abruptly and are proven ridiculously inaccurate in this juvenile portrayal of what
she is apparently convinced represents successful marriage, with all its compromises
and imperfections.
The characters in this novel all appear as cardboard cutouts, propped up by their
improbable names like Gawain, Launcelot, Antoinette, Aurelie, suggesting a “roman a clés” composed with some modicum of intelligence and substance, but the dialogue soon turns smutty and slutty and it becomes disappointingly clear that Groff’s familiarity with medieval literature reaches no further than some thin Cliff Notes pamphlet. The father Gawain, is soon dispatched by a coronary, and the two-dimensional Launcelot morphs from a gangly, acne-ridden youth who is banished to prep school after his sexual initiation by Gwennie, to Lotto, a notorious, irresistible “pussy hound” at college. The names in this book are like post-its on the characters, signaling some undisclosed, private joke of the author which conceal her “cleverness” and keep the reader guessing. Is Lotto’s nickname really a clue to the character’s future as a Powerball? Only Groff’s smug manipulation of the fates of her players on her chessboard knows – perhaps.
Early on, the prep school scenes speak briefly to John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, but soon descend to clichés and Groff’s limited knowledge of what a prep school experience can be. Death comes quickly in Groff’s tale and she exploits both youth and age in the reminder that no one is invulnerable or immortal. So many lost opportunities to write deeply and meaningfully about the experiences, which are either suppressed or glossed over. But that’s the “fate” of a furiously mediocre writer!
Lotto’s college sexual conquests are legend when, in his senior year he meets the striking young Mathilde, who stands six feet tall and is “eye to eye” in heels with Lotto’s six feet six frame. Groff’s characters rise above their normal-height peers, towering in a stratospheric air of their own, implying a superiority of being; a gilded youth; a golden future assured.
Lotto and the “virginal” Mathilde consummate their marriage two weeks after meeting and begin their life in New York, which is gradually revealed as something it does not appear to be at first sight. Of course no marriage is perfect, and compromises and sacrifices are to be made on both sides for a long relationship to survive. Lotto struggles in his career as a mediocre Hamlet; refuses financial help from Antoinette; Mathilde goes to work to pay the bills. Yes, there IS something rotten in the game of Lotto and Mathilde, but Groff strings her reader through pages and pages of trivial, boring dialogue. How many reams of paper; how many trees could have been saved if she had taken her Hemingway to heart and cut out at least every other undisciplined flowery phrase, every trite, over-written description, every little titillation of the endless seductions which soon become uninteresting as she sprinkles them randomly within this 400 page door-stopper.
Following Lotto’s failure as an actor, he suddenly wakes up one morning having pounded out something on his computer which he can’t even remember, and with Mathilde’s help, shapes his midnight rambling into a successful play. Implausibly, Lotto becomes the toast of the town and a revered playwright. Groff has exercised her authorship to transform Lotto into some kind of overnight Kardashian fame as a pseudo-acceptable-intellectual, titling his plays in the manner of Greek tragedy. His fictitious “Antigonad” may be Groff’s idea of a subtle feminist “anti gonad” nudge, or perhaps it is just one of her Freudian slips. Nevertheless, from my point of view, Groff might have entitled her novel, The Gonadicon, or the Priapucon, or The Dickathon Monologues, since Lotto’s talents, up to this time have been confined to his expertise in penetrating the female body. His writing prowess comes out of nowhere as his “brain” and most of his thoughts are definitely located below his beltline. So be it is the prerogative of the author, but this is no Greek or otherwise tragedy!
Some of the most agonizing and extraneous of Groff’s pages describe Lotto’s abortive attempt at opera while doing a stint at the McDowell Colony. This episode underscores the erratic and inconsistent writing in the book, in which it is painfully evident when Groff has shifted gears after a hiatus, vacation, whatever. She has to work on smoother transitions with less “tragedic” outcomes. It seems a common tool of mediocre writers to use death as a transition.
It takes a while of slogging to learn Mathilde’s secrets and deceptions; her childhood guilt; her bizarre upbringing: her double life at Vassar: her intense dislike of Lotto’s mother, which is reciprocated; her anger, fear, and self-loathing which is physically enacted in her secretive decision to be sterilized, thereby denying Lotto’s dream of having children. There is a “bad seed” harboring within Mathilde which is only gradually doled out to us in small doses, reminiscent at times of The Story of O and Fifty Shades of Grey mixed with ingredients of c-grade mid-morning television soap opera. Groff’s arrogant, tiresome, whining characters cannot respond to her attempt to transform the sack of rancid flour she is trying to bake into a glorious, original cake!
Frankly my dear, and I’m not alone, one just can’t give a DAMN about the fates OR furies of ANY of these cardboard people.
If Groff’s writing is the product of education at Amherst and Madison, no wonder so much is made of the failure of American teaching, and the collapse of all rigorous standards, which results in imperfect sentence structure; disregard for grammar and intelligent use of words; and a general pollution of language by succumbing to the lowest, most vulgar level of expression, rather than attempt to elevate the genre.
My advice to Ms Groff, for a starter, would be to “cut the Cute” since “Cute doesn’t cut it anymore.” Trim the pork and flowery phrases and get down to some discipline and structure. Then, sine qua non, slow down, reflect, take a year off; self-educate by reading George Eliot, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Proust, Henry James’ Aspects of the Novel, Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood, Lydia Davis, even Margaret Mitchell, and James Wood’s How Fiction Works. If and when you start up again after a few more years of observation and maturation, write some plausible, believable, sympathetic, three-dimensional characters who people can care about.
Mathilde, nee Aurelie in France, turns out to be the most unbelievable and furious character. Inhabited by “furies” she is hardly a “sound” from Faulkner, but her “bad seed” is revealed at the age of four when she consciously or unconsciously nudges her toddler brother down a flight of stairs with disastrous consequences. (Groff echoes the “fate” of her brother in Lotto’s accident while descending an aircraft stairway, which severely injures but does not kill him.)
Banished to live with her French concubine grandmother, who comes to a grisly end, she is taken in by her uncle in the U.S, who provides her shelter and education but denies her affection or support after secondary school.
Her improbable chance-meeting with Ariel leads to Aurelie’s, now Mathilde’s four year S&M contract of bondage which allows her to attend Vassar while weekending in Ariel’s New York milieu. Is it coincidence, like a Thomas Hardy novel, that this double-life terminates almost precisely on the day she meets Lotto? Another clumsy, improbable, fateful manipulation by the author.
Mathilde’s deceptions extend beyond logic into her marriage with Lotto; returning to the curiously amenable Ariel as a “hands off” employee in his art gallery in order to pay the rent. In many ways Lotto is blind to his wife’s secrets as she manipulates him.
After a disastrous seminar performance in Palo Alto, Mathilde abandons Lotto, without money for a cab, and refuses to answer his telephone calls. He has alienated himself from his female audience by suggesting that female creativity is different from male, more “inside”, like having babies. Misunderstood and reviled, he is rejected by his audience and his wife and left to walk back to San Francisco. Mathilde is ironically “teaching” Lotto a lesson, even though she refuses to have a child with him, and thereby destructively negates her only chance at “creativity.”
Her furious shallowness is further indelicately expressed by Groff after Lotto has “croaked” (author’s word) at 46 and she spirals into a series of grief-driven, indiscriminate sexual encounters. Sex, for Groff, is the only antidote to unhappiness, stress, lack of self esteem, poverty, insecurity, almost everything. At no time is there an attempt at introspection, self awareness, or intelligent, thoughtful analysis of a problem. These attributes do not exist within the aging Mathilde, and in a final attempt to erase her past, she returns to her birthplace and quietly arranges to have it demolished. This vitriolic, unnecessary act confirms and cements my dislike for this monstrous, vindictive, deceptive, mean character. And the “celebratory” dinner at Closerie des Lilas in Paris is absurd, name dropping nonsense. Yes Ms Groff, we ALL know it was Hemingway’s favorite in the 20s!
Mathilde’s final betrayal of Lotto’s friend Chollie is outrageous, after all of his generosity and loyalty. At least Groff allows Mathilde some small bit of conscience when she withdraws the revealing evidence of Chollie’s wrongdoings. We DO have friends for a reason.
Finally, perhaps Groff should take her own character’s advice, and as Lotto speculated, pursue HER definition of “women’s creativity” (HER words) and have another baby and save all those trees. Anyway, I won’t be reading another book of hers.
I gingerly wrapped the hard cover copy in saran cling wrap which somewhat staunched the stench of Fates and Furies, and perhaps I would add – Phonies, held it at arms length, and tossed it into the nearest dumpster.
William Drake
February 2016
For the reader’s information:
William Drake attended an eastern prep school where he completed four years of Latin, two years of Greek, and five years of French.
He graduated from an Ivy league college with a degree in English literature.
He has received several graduate degrees including two in the area of Greek mythology.
He lived in Paris for three years and dined frequently at the Closerie des Lilas.
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