Words&Dirt

For the first hundred pages or so, Lauren Groff’s Arcadia fooled me into thinking it was something less than a spectacular novel. It begins on an eponymous commune in western New York State during the 1970s, hitting all the tiresome notes one expects from a narrative about people trying to “beat the system” with hard work and “fuck the Man” sentiments. Groff focuses tightly on Bit––the eldest and most diminutive member of Arcadia’s youth. Embedded in a community of irresponsible and impoverished but well-meaning adults, Bit and his ingenuous friends experience the awestruck cognition of post-1960s American consciousness alongside the terrors of instability and routine privation. Bit’s development is buffeted by the emotional vicissitudes of his mother, Hannah, whose manic depressive behavior syncs with the seasons. Hannah’s unpredictability is nicely counter-balanced by Abe, Bit’s stalwart and ever-resourceful father.

My aversion to this opening had everything to do with my dislike of the utopian language and ideology that characterizes commune life. I did a lot of harrumphing and eye-rolling, and couldn’t figure out at first whether Groff was quietly approving of this outlandish lifestyle or seeking to condemn it from the inside. The story didn’t seem to have direction or momentum, and I was overwhelmed by the surfeit of supporting characters. If this novel can be said to have a significant flaw, it is that perhaps Groff does not put enough effort into introducing these anti-establishment weirdos. But it is also true that the feeling of sensory overload that dominates Bit’s upbringing is facilitated by the joyful and despairing chaos that pervades Arcadia, the gnawing intimation that too much is going on with nothing to crystallize Arcadia––let alone the surrounding world––into comprehensibility:

The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spinning into nothing. Beyond Arcadia hulk the things he has dreamed of: museums, steel towers, pools, zoos, theaters, oceans full of strange creatures…He is frightened of the Outside: either that it will be all that he imagines or that it won’t be. (96-7)

This is a good moment to point out that Lauren Groff is quickly becoming one of 21st-century America’s literary heavyweights. Between Arcadia and Fates and Furies, Groff has revealed a unique and mature voice whose continued development can only mean positive things for the future of American literature.  Her prose teems with creativity and cosmic vibrance, her thinking sharpened by precise diction, pacing and imagery into a keenly enlightened edge. Some samples:

Time comes to him one morning, stealing in. One moment he is looking at the lion puppet on his hand that he’s flapping about to amuse Eden’s russet potato of a baby, and the next he understands something he never knew to question. He sees it clearly, now, how time is flexible, a rubber band. It can stretch long and be clumped tight, can be knotted and folded over itself, and all the while it is endless, a loop. There will be night and then morning, and then night again. The year will end, another one will begin, will end. An old man dies, a baby is born. (71)

He imagines snapping his fingers, making all the people in the diner stand, at once, and become their better selves. The woman with the cragged oak-bark face throws off her hood and shakes her hair and her age drops off of her like bandages. The man with a monk’s tonsure, muttering to himself, leaps onto a table and strikes music from the air. Out of the bowels of the kitchen the weary cooks, small brown people, cartwheel and break-dance, spinning like upended beetles on the ground and their faces crack into glee and they are suddenly lovely to look at, and the dozen customers start up all at once into loud song, voices broken and beautiful. The song rises and infiltrates the city and wakes the inhabitants, one by one, from their own dark dreams, and all across the island, people sit in bed and listen to it lap around them, an ocean of kindness, filling them, making them forget all the evil leaching out of the world for a very long moment, making them forget everything but the song.

He laughs at himself and the vision dissolves. There is lassitude, the door opening to the cold air and single bundled bodies coming in. The silent waitress ministers to those who sit down. The night draws into morning. Here they are forever, sitting at their tables, separate, alone. (203-4)

He is too tired to sleep, and sits under an old comforter on a rocking chair on the porch, watching the dawn slip in. He can’t remember the last time he quietly watched this drama unfold; what could possibly seem so important that it kept him from doing this? When did he become a person who stopped noticing? First the moon dims, and in the east there’s a slit in the belly of the sky. A trickle of light pours over the hills, over the Amish farms, over the country roads, over the limit of Arcadia, the miles and miles and forest, startling the songbirds and lighting the dew from within. (255, emphasis hers)

Such poignant passages await readers on nearly every page of Arcadia, and would lend the novel merit even if its characters and plot proved lifeless. These elements, however, eventually shine with as much energy as Groff’s superb language, building in a slow burn of a story that spans many decades and trickles into a near-future world in which the rising tide of climate change is beginning to macerate civilization, and where the fever dreams that birthed Arcadia are revealed in all their deceitful glory.

Arcadia’s latter sections are such a delightful surprise that I don’t want to reveal any details, but prospective readers should be warned that this novel is not for the faint of heart. This is a disturbing tale––not one without moments of levity, but tremendously sad. Groff’s all-too-believable future is a doomed one, where truth and beauty alight on the page like birds that wing away in an instant, leaving humanity to ponder its grief and wonder:

Peace, he knows, can be shattered in a million variations: great visions of the end, rain of ash, a disease on the wind, a blast in the distance, the sun dying like a kerosene lamp clicked off. And in smaller ways: an overheard remark, his daughter’s sour mood, his own body faltering. There’s no use in anticipating the mode. He will wait for the hushed spaces in life, for Ellis’s snore in the dark, for Grete’s stealth kiss, for the warm light inside the gallery, his images on the wall broken beyond beauty into blisters and fragments, returning in the eye to beauty again. The voices of women at night on the street, laughing; he has always loved the voices of women. Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath. (289)

Arcadia is a journey that understands how ideas and history and love and loss get crammed into people through the crude, sublime exertions of experience. I give it my unqualified recommendation.

Rating: 10/10