Fates and Furies.

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies was nominated for a National Book Award in 2015, losing to Adam Johnson’s short story collection Fortune Smiles, and was widely praised as her best work to date. This intricate, profound novel about a marriage as the intersection of two lives presents that intersection from two distinct and often contradictory perspectives, a story that is beautifully told and that gripped me more the further I read.

The first part of the book, titled “Fates” – ten points if you can guess the title of the second part – introduces us to Lancelot, nicknamed Lotto, born in the eye of a hurricane and in some ways a very lucky child. He’s wealthy beyond measure before he’s finished his first cry, and as time passes it will become clear that he’s blessed with good lucks and great talent as a writer, but even someone born lucky doesn’t get a life free of worry, sorry, or even some bad fortune too.

After years of diffident debauchery, with a handful of broken hearts among the many women who sought his company and only got sex, Lotto sees Mathilde walk into a party right near the end of his college years, walks towards her and immediately asks her to marry him. A few weeks later they do indeed wed, and then live as starving artists – his vengeful mother, more fury than fate to be sure, cuts him off when she learns of the marriage – while he tries to find work as an actor and she works in advertising and then in an art gallery to keep them afloat. A real stroke of luck reveals his talent as a writer, and he becomes an acclaimed playwright for going on two decades until the fairy tale and part one both end.

Furies tells the same story from Mathilde’s side, and the trees we could not make out while standing in the forest are clear and sharp when viewed from above. Mathilde’s childhood isn’t what Lotto believed, and much of what he thought was fate was anything but. She’s a stronger character than the subservient wife we see in Fates, and angrier at a life that did not give her any fortune other than perhaps some physical beauty. Mathilde had to scratch and claw for nearly everything she got in life before Lotto, and then had to work twice as hard as he ever did to keep them going during his lean years as an actor, and then plays far more of a role in his writing career than the first part lets on. The first part is the veneer, and the second the solid wood beneath. It is stronger, but it’s not as pretty. Once the revelations start spilling, they come fast, and they frequently upend your impression of one or both main characters.

The parallel structure of the two parts mirrors the dichotomy of the title, but also presents the “two sides to every story” bromide in a new light by giving primacy to Mathilde’s side. The Greek Fates were three goddesses who determined the length of a mortal’s life, but did not concern themselves with what went on during that life. Lotto’s story feels like one mapped out by the Fates – very little of his life appears to be directed by outside forces, and while there’s luck from the circumstances of his birth, reading part one gives you the sense that he is the prime mover in his own universe, right up until the thread spun by the Fates is cut.

That’s not true, of course, but Groff saves the explanation until Furies, when it becomes clear that Mathilde’s machinations were responsible for much of what happened to Lotto, right down to their not-coincidental first meeting, from college onward. So much of her life is driven by vengeance, whether directly aimed at someone else or in the vein of “living well is the best revenge,” which is a major part of the mythology of the Greek Furies. (Wikipedia describes them as underworld deities of vengeance.) Once widowed, she’s determined to become the protagonist of her own life for the first time, yet becomes even more driven by the desire for revenge, especially when she realizes that one longtime acquaintance went out of his way to try to sabotage her marriage to Lotto.

The plot itself is intricate and almost immediately compelling, with so much realistic detail that it’s hard to believe one person conceived both of these characters’ lives. Groff’s character development, even with several of the side characters like Lotto’s family and childhood friends, is superb, both in interest and credibility. Lotto being a playwright is a bit more of the writers writing about writers problem, and I found it hard to buy into the idea of him becoming so financially successful or even moderately famous in that line of work, but if you get past that, much of what follows is plausible, and his vocation allows Groff to work in endless literary references (only a few of which I caught).

Groff ends the novel with a revelation that explains much of what went before, and even casts doubt on some parts of the story, but in a way that also opens up a whole series of questions that you might have felt were answered by the two parts. It’s a gimmick, but she executes it well, and if anything it seemed to underscore some of the questions posed over the course of Furies around the choices Mathilde made in trying to create a far better life for herself than the one lowercase-f fate has offered her. It’s a brilliant, incisive, deeply philosophical work that moves like popular fiction but still has me thinking a few weeks after I finished.

Next up: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Acintya bheda bheda fatwa.