Words&Dirt

Summary:

Lauren Groff’s Matrix is a work of historical fiction loosely based on the life of Marie de France, a poet from the 12th century. Groff depicts Marie as an unusually large and willful woman who, at the young age of seventeen, is forced to join an impoverished abbey of nuns somewhere in England. Matrix tells the story of how Marie survives, gains power and influence, seeks love and connection, and lives out the rest of her life as the abbey’s leader.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• Like all of Groff’s novels, the writing in Matrix is top-notch. For this story, Groff displays an impressive understanding of the religious rituals, material goods, and daily activities of medieval abbey life.
• Marie balks tradition by actively rejecting the Catholic attitude that suffering is a desirable means of bringing people closer to God, by amassing power and wealth on the abbey’s behalf, and by engaging in romantic and sexual relations with other nuns. In these ways, Marie feels a bit like a “modern woman” struggling against the oppressive norms of a bygone era. I had a mixed reaction to this dynamic; I couldn’t quite decide whether Groff’s version of Marie felt like a believable iconoclast or an awkward means of injecting 21st-century ideas and values into a 12th-century environment.
• Throughout her long life, Marie experiences a sequence of religious “visions” (hallucinations) that guide her priorities as abbess. These visions motivate Marie to protect her community and grow its capacity for flourishing, but they also cause her to become overly prideful and stubborn due to her perceived unique connection to the divine. The tension between Marie’s beneficence and arrogance is well-executed, but unfortunately it resulted in me liking her a lot more in her younger years and much less as she got older. She does, however, discover new forms of humility in her final years.
• Despite being short and consistently well-written, I found myself less and less engaged as Matrix proceeded. By the end I didn’t feel like I had much invested in the final outcome, although I enjoyed several stirring passages where Marie reflected on her life and works.

Favorite Quotes:

It is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves. (51)

Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not. (177)

Prayer helps, but what helps more are stories. (222-3)

Collapse is the constant state of humanity, she tells herself; the story of the flood and the great ark that saved the creatures two by two is only the first refrain of a song that is to be sung over and over, the earth’s gradual and repeated diminishment, civilization after civilization foundering to dust, until the final death of the children of Eve with the apocalypse, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven angels, the seven bowls. In the end, the earth will crack and the wicked will be cast into the lake of fire. Marie suspect this fiery end would be the stone and the soil and the waters of the earth itself, through human folly and greed made too hot for it to be willing to bear any more life upon its back. So it will go, and so it would be; and Marie cannot stop it, even if she had the force of will any longer to do so. (226-7)

As the bells for Matins sounded in the dark and she walked back in the darkness as though blind, she wondered if in fact this had been the closest she had been to god––not in fact invisible parent, not sun warming the earth and coaxing the seeds from the soil––but the nothing at the center of the self. Not the Word, because speaking the Word limits the greatness of the infinite; but silence beyond the Word in which their lives infinity. (244)

Rating: 5/10