Title:
Arcadia
Author: Lauren Groff
Publisher: Hyperion Voice
Release Date: March 13, 2012
Hardcover, 304 pages
ISBN 10: 1401340873
ISBN 13:
9781401340872
The Book Depository /
Amazon
Goodreads description:
A brilliant follow-up to Groff's bestselling debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia is the romantic, lush, haunting story of the American Dream and of a gifted young man born into an idealistic community.
In the fields and forests of western New York State in the late 1960s, several dozen idalists set out to live off the land, founding what becomes a famous commune centered on the grounds of a decaying mansion called Arcadia House. Arcadia follows this lyrical, rollicking, tragic, and exquisite utopian dream from its hopeful start through its heyday and after. The novel particularly centers on a young boy - Ridley Sorrel Stone, known as "little Bit," and later, "it", who is born soon after the commune is established.
While Arcadia and the Arcadians rise and fall an evolve across three generations , Bit, of course, ages too. Played out against the backdrop of Arcadia is Bit's lifelong love affair with a young woman on the commune - the lithe and deeply troubled Helle. How does he, an extremely sensitive man, make his way through life and through the world outside Arcadia where he must eventually live?
What unfolds is an astonishingly beautiful and gripping novel. With Arcadia, Lauren Groff establishes herself as one of the most gifted young fiction writers at work today.
My Take:
This is the story of Bit, the first child born to the Free People, a commune headed by a charismatic leader named Handy in New York state. We follow him through his childhood and adolescence, then skip to his adulthood living in New York.
There is a large cast of disparate characters, but Ms. Groff does an excellent job sorting them out for us and making them fully dimensional.
The commune grows and eventually disintegrates as do all utopian visions when faced with the reality of human nature, and Bit's maturing voice keeps the reader in his present moment. As a toddler, his observations are somewhat superficial, and as he grows, his observations become more in-depth, but still stay true to his projected age at the time of the telling. We see through his eyes the eventual disillusionment of both of his parents, Hanna and Abe, with the commune's leader and with the eventual hierarchy that places one group in the main house and the others in cottages separated into certain groups. We witness through a child's eyes a horrible accident that happens to his father, and through an adolescent's eyes first love, and a wrenching away from all that is familiar.
When we again meet Bit as an adult, he is raising his daughter Grete as a single father, his wife having disappeared. We walk with him through the care-taking of his mother Hannah, who has ALS and we are saddened by the situation that put her into full-time care. Once again, disintegration creeps into the plot - the disintegration of Hannah's abilities as well as a disintegration of the wider world, which is fighting a pandemic and going through various crises, including a citrus blight.
Ms. Groff's writing is slow-paced and luminous, which makes for a lovely story. I must admit that the first half of the book, while it held my attention, did not draw me totally in, although I did connect with many of the characters and situations. Once I met Bit as an adult, however, I was transfixed by this truly gentle, loving soul and hoped against hope for his own happy ending.
While this is a contemplative novel, it can be enjoyed by the more casual reader because a LOT happens in these pages. For the more "serious" reader, it can be read with a mind towards the deeper connections implied in the growth of one person and what happens in that person's wider world.
I closed the pages reluctantly, not wanting to let Bit go off into the ether, but very happy to have met him.
QUOTES (from an ARC; may be different in final copy):
There is, Bit knows, what happens on the surface, and there is what pulls beneath.
Though people here have private rituals, Muhammad kneeling on a bit of carpet during the day, Jewish Seders and Christmas trees, religion here is seen much like hygiene: a personal concern best kept in check so as to not bully the others.
I don't know how much longer I can handle it, Hannah says. This isn't what I signed up for, this isn't a better life, this isn't anything but poverty and hard work and not enough money to buy the kids winter boots.
He imagines cities as larger Arcadias, but harder, meaner, people walking around thrusting cash at each other. He has seen the coins like embossed washers, the bits of green paper. Humans out there are grotesque: Scrooges and Jellybys and filthy orphans in the caverns of blacking factories, in lonely depopulated homes, a blight called television like tiny Plato's caves in every room. It is grimmer in the Outside. There is war in the Falkland Islands, there are Sandinistas and Contras, there are muggings and rapes, terrible things he had heard the adults talking about, has read about himself when he can find an old wrinkled paper in the Free Store. The president is an actor, placed in power to smoothly deliver the corporations' lies.
Writing: 5 out of 5 stars
Plot: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Characters: 4 out of 5 stars
Reading Immersion: 4 out 5 stars
BOOK RATING: 4.3 out of 5 stars
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Disclosure: I received a complimentary ARC of this title from the publisher to facilitate my review. No other compensation was received and I was not required to post a positive review.
