I've discovered the solution to the tepid second novel that critics' lore insists a promising young novelist will inevitably produce. Just wait and read the second novel first, and then go back and read the first. Earlier this year I read Arcadia, Lauren Groff's second novel. It was good. Darn good, in fact. So good it was one of the contenders in the Tournament of Books.
But I just finished The Monsters of Templeton, Groff's debut novel published in 2008, and it blew Arcadia right out of the water. Monsters has, well, a monster. A real one. We're not talking some metaphoric mental monster, but an actual, honest-to-god, lives-in-the-lake, and may-or-may-not-be-drowing-people monster.
And yes, okay, the monster is in fact symbolic of the monstrous secrets being kept in the town that surface at the same time as the monster. It wouldn't be lit-rah-cha if there wasn't any symbolism, of course. But Groff took what could've been an average novel on well-worn themes (daddy issues much?) and pulled the story-telling equivalent of lifting a rabbit out of a top hat. Except the rabbit isn't a boring old rabbit. It's a monster. A real, live monster, "huge, a heavy cream color that darkened to lemon in places. . . . It looked like a carp grown enormous, with a carp's fat belly and round eye, but with a long, articulated neck like a ballet dancer's and four finned legs, plump as a frog." When was the last time you got to read about a monster outside of a horror novel? Never, yeah?
On more, shall we say, traditional grounds, the novel is just as skilled as Arcadia. It looks at similar themes in terms of what constitutes a family, how perceptions and knowledge are formed, and what happens when a new reality intrudes. The main character, Willie Upton, searches her family's history to reveal her own "monsters," which for the most part aren't that monstrous, but really are only the departures from "authorized" history that happen in every family. As Willie explores her family's history back to her founding ancestors in the 18th century, Groff explores the quintessential American family in microcosm, and thus presents us with a portrait of our own American geniture. Although Willie is the protagonist who must live with the consequences, Groff lets each generation tell its own story and make its own confessions. Each generation's story is layered on another, not necessarily in chronological order, creating new understandings of what it means to be Willie Upton, and, for the rest of us, what it means to be a descendent of the American experiment—although that really sounds too grand for the immediate, intimate nature of this story.
As in Arcadia, Groff's prose is impressive. It manages to be exquisite and delicate without looking like she tried to make it exquisite and delicate. In the course of the week or so that I was reading Monsters, I found myself thinking in Groff's voice, the way you do when you're engrossed in a novel. Letting an author infect my brain like that is probably the highest praise I can give any writer.
So you must definitely read The Monsters of Templeton, not least because it is a relevant story told in beautiful prose. But mostly you must read Monsters because of the monster. How often as an adult do you get to read about a monster you can really believe in?
Oh, and the friendly if somewhat anal-retentive ghost. Did I mention the ghost? I can't believe I forgot to tell you about the ghost!
Showing posts with label Lauren Groff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lauren Groff. Show all posts
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Monday, January 14, 2013
Reading Journal: Arcadia
I couldn't sleep last night, so finally had the time to finish Arcadia (Lauren Groff, Voice Publishing, 2012).
It took me an unforgivably long time to figure out what Arcadia is about. The plot centers around a 1970s commune in up-state New York, as seen through the eyes of the first child born into the group, Bit Stone. Bit observes as the community at first thrives, then disintegrates when it becomes too heavy to support its own weight. The book concludes 40 or so years later, in a near-future dystopian landscape of virus pandemics and an irreparably damaged ecosystem. It's an engaging read simply as a narrative about community.
But what Arcadia is about finally hit me in a scene in which Bit, who has grown up to be a photography professor, is talking with a student who wants an A but has received an A-. Bit tells her, "An A means perfect. I've never had a perfect student. Nobody is perfect." My reaction to Bit's statement was entirely mediated by my inner English teacher. I've seen other teachers' rubrics that require 0 typos and 0 grammatical errors to earn a perfect score; these requirements make me angry. A student who works hard, who demonstrates an understanding of the material, who has clearly grown through the completion of an assignment, does not deserve to have points docked for an isolated misplaced comma. I can think of no better way to discourage a student from a love of learning and writing than to insist on perfection. Bit's requirements for perfection are even more stringent, so stringent that it's literally impossible to meet them. And he knows that. He has set his students up to fail. This is when I lost my patience with Bit Stone, and understood what Groff was trying to accomplish in the novel: an exploration of whether perfection is really perfect.
Groff's answer is, I think, no. Bit tries and fails to build the perfect community and the perfect family. The tragedy, Bit would have us believe, is his failure to achieve perfection, the failure of the community around him to cooperate. The failure is the charismatic commune leader's tendency to issue undemocratic edicts and duck actual work, the community members' failure to understand how to support themselves, his mother's failure to will-power her way through her depression, and Bit's own failure to cure his mother of her sadness. But Groff's idea of tragedy is Bit's failure to appreciate the versions of perfection that do exist, the perfection in the way his community does function.
At the same time, Groff wonders how we know who we are. Are our own identities self-created, created by the perceptions of those around us, or innate? When teenage Bit leaves Arcadia with his parents, he finds himself undone: "The warp of stories that had always blanketed him, his personal mythology, was invisible, so nobody knew him; no one knew he was the miracle baby, Little Bit of a Hippie, Abe and Hannah's boy; . . . they didn't know anything at all." And if no one knows the mythology, who is Bit Stone? He's just Ridley Sorrel Stone, "named for a town we never did see," just as no one in the Outside can see Bit as he sees himself and expects to be seen.
Perfection, Groff leads us to conclude, is, like our own identities, self-created. Toward the end of the novel, Bit's mother, echoing the perspective Bit's has taken throughout, bemoans the fact that if Bit hadn't had to take care of everyone else, he could have been an artist. Unexpectedly, Bit answers, "I am an artist." That moment of self-identification and self-awareness shows Bit as he has grown to be, a person who can create his own perfection when he needs to, and can accept others as he finds them.
These are just a few thoughts on a very meaty novel. I haven't even mentioned Bit's wife, Helle, whose experience of Arcadia is the nightmare inverse of Bit's, or the role that irreversible climate change plays in enhancing the novel's theme. There's enough material in Arcadia for several seminar-length essays. But I'll spare you, and answer the one question you care about:
Recommended? Yes.
It took me an unforgivably long time to figure out what Arcadia is about. The plot centers around a 1970s commune in up-state New York, as seen through the eyes of the first child born into the group, Bit Stone. Bit observes as the community at first thrives, then disintegrates when it becomes too heavy to support its own weight. The book concludes 40 or so years later, in a near-future dystopian landscape of virus pandemics and an irreparably damaged ecosystem. It's an engaging read simply as a narrative about community.
But what Arcadia is about finally hit me in a scene in which Bit, who has grown up to be a photography professor, is talking with a student who wants an A but has received an A-. Bit tells her, "An A means perfect. I've never had a perfect student. Nobody is perfect." My reaction to Bit's statement was entirely mediated by my inner English teacher. I've seen other teachers' rubrics that require 0 typos and 0 grammatical errors to earn a perfect score; these requirements make me angry. A student who works hard, who demonstrates an understanding of the material, who has clearly grown through the completion of an assignment, does not deserve to have points docked for an isolated misplaced comma. I can think of no better way to discourage a student from a love of learning and writing than to insist on perfection. Bit's requirements for perfection are even more stringent, so stringent that it's literally impossible to meet them. And he knows that. He has set his students up to fail. This is when I lost my patience with Bit Stone, and understood what Groff was trying to accomplish in the novel: an exploration of whether perfection is really perfect.
Groff's answer is, I think, no. Bit tries and fails to build the perfect community and the perfect family. The tragedy, Bit would have us believe, is his failure to achieve perfection, the failure of the community around him to cooperate. The failure is the charismatic commune leader's tendency to issue undemocratic edicts and duck actual work, the community members' failure to understand how to support themselves, his mother's failure to will-power her way through her depression, and Bit's own failure to cure his mother of her sadness. But Groff's idea of tragedy is Bit's failure to appreciate the versions of perfection that do exist, the perfection in the way his community does function.
At the same time, Groff wonders how we know who we are. Are our own identities self-created, created by the perceptions of those around us, or innate? When teenage Bit leaves Arcadia with his parents, he finds himself undone: "The warp of stories that had always blanketed him, his personal mythology, was invisible, so nobody knew him; no one knew he was the miracle baby, Little Bit of a Hippie, Abe and Hannah's boy; . . . they didn't know anything at all." And if no one knows the mythology, who is Bit Stone? He's just Ridley Sorrel Stone, "named for a town we never did see," just as no one in the Outside can see Bit as he sees himself and expects to be seen.
Perfection, Groff leads us to conclude, is, like our own identities, self-created. Toward the end of the novel, Bit's mother, echoing the perspective Bit's has taken throughout, bemoans the fact that if Bit hadn't had to take care of everyone else, he could have been an artist. Unexpectedly, Bit answers, "I am an artist." That moment of self-identification and self-awareness shows Bit as he has grown to be, a person who can create his own perfection when he needs to, and can accept others as he finds them.
These are just a few thoughts on a very meaty novel. I haven't even mentioned Bit's wife, Helle, whose experience of Arcadia is the nightmare inverse of Bit's, or the role that irreversible climate change plays in enhancing the novel's theme. There's enough material in Arcadia for several seminar-length essays. But I'll spare you, and answer the one question you care about:
Recommended? Yes.
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