Mind Picker: Fates and Furies

Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely.

Fates and Furies is an it book: National Book Award finalist, Amazon's #1 book of 2015, apparently President Obama's favourite read of the year; it sounded like a slam dunk. As for me...I thought it was just okay. Promoted as the next Gone Girl (oh, how everyone wants a ride on that gravy train), the only thing they have in common is a he said/she said view of a marriage – and while in the case of Gone Girl that meant a twisty turnaround (“you never knew me at your peril”), with Fates and Furies the second perspective is complementary instead of contradictory (“you didn't know this stuff but it doesn't affect us anyway”). I would say that line-by-line Lauren Groff is a much better writer than Gillian Flynn, but she didn't write the more satisfying novel: somewhere in the execution of a clever concept, Groff got lost.

The book opens with a brief scene between a newly married young couple and then rewinds to the origin story of the husband, Lotto. We watch as he is born and raised in Florida, sent away to boarding school and Vassar, and witness him meeting the love of his life, Mathilde. They marry, he makes an underwhelming stab at an acting career, finds success as a playwright. This first section is called “Fates” and that seems appropriate: Lotto appears to be a favourite of the gods, destined to be everyone's best-loved person, a golden boy who gets no less than he deserves. And through most of this charmed life, he counts on the bedrock that is Mathilde's love.

They had been married for seventeen years; she lived in the deepest room in his heart. And sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself. Abstraction of her before the visceral being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of a sudden. The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning.

The second half of the book is called “Furies” and this is also fitting: Mathilde starts her story after the death of her husband, and as she intermittently inserts the narrative of her own childhood and youth while going forward in time towards her own death, we not only see why she would have anger (“fury”) at her core, but in the classical sense of the Furies, the reader can also understand why she would be driven by wrath and vengeance. Although there are some surprises, Mathilde's secret inner life doesn't undermine the first half of the book: she sincerely loves her husband and only ever wants what's best for him.

It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.

So what's the point? To say that even in the closest marriage people have secrets from one another? That isn't an earth-shattering revelation. As the study of an individual marriage, Fates and Furies was interesting enough to keep me reading, but if it's meant to be an allegory for all marriages – and by overtly invoking classical themes, that seems to be the case – well, it's neither deep enough nor broad enough to reach the status of allegory. In the end, it all seems a bit pointless.

Yet, in the moment, it feels clever and literary. This is a book with mermaids and sirens (and was I the only one who didn't realise that Ariel the gallery owner was a man? Was I the only one suckered into thinking Ariel from The Little Mermaid instead of Ariel from The Tempest, even though both are referenced?); there are Arthurian heroes with Gawain, two Lancelots, Gwenevere, and Sir Roland; Lotto is forever quoting Shakespeare in everyday life and writing plays based on classical themes (even though it felt overlong at the time, at least now I know Antigone's story from Lotto's opera based upon her). In a most clever and classical device, even though each half of the book has an omniscient narrator, there's a super-omniscient voice that sporadically breaks in (like a Greek chorus or the Moerae muttering as they weave their tapestries of destiny) to clear up small questions, as in:

Mathilde was there in the dawn, this perfect girl as if made to his specifications. [A different life, had Lotto listened to the terror: no glory, no plays; peace, ease, and money. No glamour; children. Which life was better? Not for us to say.]

Because I did like this device, I think something would definitely be lost if one listened to an audiobook. Beyond what I found clever, there was much that annoyed me in this book: the perfect devotion of Lotto and Mathilde; every other character (and all that backstory) while interesting, had no bearing at all on the main couple; naming your dog “God” is overly precious; I didn't believe that the FBI would call off an investigation just because someone decided not to hand over evidence; I didn't believe that someone who was desperate to have children would spend decades with an “if it's meant to be it will be” attitude. Overall, Lotto felt too good to be true (even if the point is that he's beloved by the gods), and while Mathilde was more real, her selfless devotion (and behind-the scenes machinations) felt too good to be true; this is not a marriage that I recognise; the cleverness of the concept does not survive scrutiny. It was just okay; I don't get the hype.