Words&Dirt

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera compares human lives to musical compositions. He writes of two lovers whose “musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them” (89). Kundera contents himself with cataloging a “short dictionary” of words the two lovers understand in radically different ways, but claims he “could compile a long lexicon of their misunderstandings” (89).

For Lauren Groff, a “short dictionary” won’t cut it. Her novel Fates and Furies can be understood as the kind of “long lexicon of misunderstandings” toward which Kundera gestures. This haunting, sexy, exquisitely-crafted tale delves into the deep ambivalence that pervades the lives of two mysterious and unique lovers. It is a lush repository of overlapping perspectives that also keep their own dark counsel––an interpersonal thriller wrapped in ruminations on the nature of marriage, as mordant as it is touching.

Fates and Furies revolves around Lotto and Mathilde, two people who marry young and spend the rest of their lives trying to comprehend the consequences of their union. Groff toys with numerous themes throughout the book, but the one I found most compelling was Lotto and Mathilde’s respective relationships with the concepts of purity and innocence. Both characters see the other as symbolic of a pristine, untainted vein of humanity, while also seeing themselves as somehow sullied.

The first part of the book––Fates––focuses on Lotto’s perspective and background. Lotto thinks of Mathilde as “the purest person he’d ever met, he, who had been primed for purity” (39). Lotto regularly contrasts himself with Mathilde, commenting on her perceived flawlessness and running himself down for being unworthy of her. This feels somewhat disingenuous given Lotto’s innate sense of entitlement and arrogant tendencies, but we also come to believe that Lotto truly thinks of his relationship with Mathilde as the greatest gift of his life––something that could never be matched or superseded. That message is often belied by Lotto’s supercilious behavior, but not to the point of feeling altogether spurious. Impressively, this high degree of emotional complexity is present on every page of Fates and Furies.

The novel’s second part––Furies––is by far the more compelling half. We are invited into Mathilde’s mind for the first time, and find it a rather different place than we might have expected––but also somehow exactly what we expected. Mathilde comes from a surprising and checkered past, but we find that, like Lotto, she has also idealized her partner:

She had never in her life met such an innocent. In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least on small splinter of evil. There was none in him…This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. (345)

Groff smartly reveals this odious dynamic for what it is: a relationship-killer. Lotto and Mathilde’s perfect visions of each other prevent them from achieving the level of intimacy that is the bedrock of a healthy relationship, resulting in emotional damage to both characters. Mathilde resolves that Lotto “would never know the scope of her darkness, that she would never show him the evil that lived in her, that he would know of her only a great love and light” (347). The irony embedded in the heart of this story derives its force from this tragic decision; Mathilde’s reluctance to reveal her full self stands as a perpetual barrier to mutual acceptance. We are left feeling that Lotto and Mathilde love each other––truly and deeply––and yet they do not really know each other.

This is the kind of book I’d normally send off with an unqualified recommendation, but there is one lingering concern that gives me pause. It is the question of whether Groff had a unified idea of what she wanted Mathilde’s story (for Fates and Furies is, above all, Mathilde’s story) to be. Groff asserts that Mathilde’s tale is emphatically not the narrative of a great love:

The story we are told of women is not this one…The way the old story goes, woman needs an other to complete her circuits, to flick her to the fullest blazing…Suddenly clear, in the small blue shape, she would see her life had not been, at its core, about love. There had been terrific love in it. Heat and magic. Lotto, her husband. Christ, there had been him. Yet––yes!––the sum of her life, she saw, was far greater than its sum of love. (235-6)

And yet, Groff’s parting thoughts on Mathilde’s life are couched precisely in the kind of language we expect from the usual stories “we are told of women”:

He had seen her and made the leap and swum through the crowd and had taken her hand, this bright boy who was giving her a place to rest…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…She wished she’d been the kind Mathilde, the good one. His idea of her. (390)

It is extremely difficult for me to read the above passages and not experience a startling and upsetting contradiction. Are we to think of Mathilde as a woman––fully mature and self-acutalized––who has experienced great love but cannot be defined by it? Or is her true identity merely an earthly shadow that undermines its own authenticity by stooping to placate an unrealistic male vision?

It is hard to say if this contradiction constitutes a flaw, or if it is instead like the single blemish on an otherwise flawless body, one that makes the carnal enjoyment of that body all the more enticing and fabulous. Does Groff reveal a weakness of inconsistency here, or is she intentionally teasing us with one last bemusing notion about the nature of life and love? Impossible to say.

What is possible to say––and I daresay necessary––is that Fates and Furies is a brilliant, beautiful book.

Rating: 9/10