Thinking about a prior Lancelot and this one’s high school girlfriend Gwennie, for example, adds layers to what happens in Groff’s very fine modern Camelot (my overly transparent description of Lotto and Mathilde’s marriage, not Groff’s). Most of her characters bear names suggestive of previous author’s creations. She also fills Fates and Furies with literary allusions.

She invites her readers to think in directions both deep and wide. Lauren Groff writes extremely well, with a real gift for subtlety. What each brings to their marriage grows directly out of his and her complicated pasts. Suffice to say, Lotto’s and Mathilde’s secrets are complicated and, in fascinating ways, help make sense of their adult personalities. As a reviewer, I try never to reveal a novel’s confidences. Some of those secrets only surface near the novel’s close, and some neither husband nor wife ever learns about the other. Naturally, we see that day in dual overtones-a couple ecstatically in love, but a couple already hiding secrets about their families and their pasts.

Mathilde remains an enigma to almost everyone, but the reader comes to fully understand the mysteries that have formed her elusive personality.įates and Furies begins on the day of Lotto and Mathilde’s wedding, an elopement that occurred only two weeks after they met. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.” Those silences are gradually revealed to the reader, though never to Lotto and never to the other characters in the novel. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. “Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. In contrast, Mathilde’s half of the novel is more internalized. “You could string together the parties Lotto and Mathilde had been to like a necklace,” Groff writes, “and you would have their marriage in miniature.” There are asides, his memories and those of his friends and acquaintances, but the essential overview of his marriage with Mathilde comes during festive occasions. The reader encounters him at parties, a string of parties that lasts throughout his life. Groff presents Lotto’s half of Fates and Furies in a rather unique way. Such double envisioning results in a three-dimensional perspective on their lust and their love, their misperceptions and their misunderstandings, the subtle ambiances of a long and enduring marriage. The second half, titled “Furies,” revisits the same marriage, many of the same events plus some new revelations, mainly from Mathilde’s point of view. The first half of Fates and Furies, titled “Fates,” examines the marriage of Lancelot (known as “Lotto” to his friends) and Mathilde mainly from Lotto’s point of view. In Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff proposes a unique way of looking at a relationship.

Fates and furies review