Fates and Furies by Lorna Groff
At the conclusion of the first chapter of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, I can already predict the storyline.
A golden couple meet at an Ivy League school, marry and move to grungy apartment in Greenwich Village where despite a lack of funds, they are blissfully happy.
In time, they move to an affluent suburb of NYC, Greenwich perhaps or Tuxedo Park. Kids follow. They buy a country house. Alcoholism, infidelity, and small tragedies ensue. The novel concludes with a reconciliation which takes place at a wedding, held at said country house.
Fates and Furies is not that novel.
Although the traditional plot line is there, Groff has crafted a much more interesting “domestic” story.
The novel is divided into two sections. Fates is the portrait of the marriage from the husband’s perspective; furies that of his wife, Mathilde. Although husbands and wives frequently perceive the same events differently, the deceit and denial in the Satterwhite marriage are breathtaking in scope.
Groff’s prose is lyrical and inventive. She also makes liberal use of bracketed asides which I found annoying initially, but the Greek chorus style comments offer yet a third perspective on the bizarre events.
As a bonus, with the references to Sophocles, Greek mythology, and Shakespeare sprinkled throughout, you can feel good about that expensive liberal arts education too!
WHO WROTE IT
Lauren Groff is the New York Times-bestselling author of two novels, The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia, as well as the celebrated short-story collection Delicate Edible Birds. Groff’s fiction has won the Paul Bowles Prize for Fiction, the Medici Book Club Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize.
WHAT OTHER REVIEWERS SAY
The New York Times: “Lauren Groff is a writer of rare gifts, and Fates and Furies is an unabashedly ambitious novel that delivers—with comedy, tragedy, well-deployed erudition and unmistakable glimmers of brilliance throughout.”