Lotto, lucky man, appears to remember nothing of his dusky labor. Mathilde wakes him to tell him that she has read it, that he has found his true talent, and that she has already started editing the manuscript. A reversal of fortune occurs on New Year’s Eve, 1999, when, in a kind of drunken trance, Lotto stays up all night and in five hours writes a play, “The Springs,” about his tempestuous family background. Though naturally ebullient, Lotto, whose father used to say that he would become President or an astronaut, suffers from depression, and starts drinking. During his twenties, Lotto struggles to make it as an actor, while Mathilde works at an art gallery, earning the regular money. They are poor (he has been cut off from the family wealth, a penalty for his spousal choice) but happy, heroically bohemian, erotically enchanted with each other. The couple move to New York (it is the early nineteen-nineties). One morning, we are told, “it struck him hard that she had no family at all”: But Lotto’s praise of her purity also has to do with the holy hygiene, the devoted erasure of Mathilde’s self-presentation. This is a characteristically patriarchal gesture: Mathilde seems to ask for little, and subsumes whatever desire for a career she may have had to his larger claims. Lotto thinks her “the purest person he’d ever met,” and later likens her to a saint. She is glamorous, but people can’t decide whether she’s beautiful or “interesting-looking.” Temperamentally, the two seem opposed. She had no friends at college, and is thought of as an “ice queen” or worse. She seems to have no legible past, no obvious context. The relationship is puzzling to Lotto’s friends: he is a college god, blessed with charm, intelligence, and riches, strapping and handsome (six feet six), a rising young actor. The attraction is intense, and they get quickly married, just before graduation.
Lotto (short for Lancelot) and Mathilde meet at a party, near the end of their time as Vassar undergraduates. The story’s form not only promises a stereoscopic account of the mythological monad that is marriage but holds the tempting possibility that the angrier second version might modify the easier first one, forcing it out of untruth with corrective revelation. Essentially, the man’s view of things (a section titled “Fates”) is happy, open, naïvely victorious, and complacent the woman’s (“Furies”) is secretive, damaged, less happy, and, accordingly, much less complacent.
Illustration by Vivienne Flesherįormally, Lauren Groff’s new novel, “Fates and Furies” (Riverhead), resembles a bed that long marital use has unevenly depressed: it tells the story of an apparently successful marriage from two different perspectives, the husband’s and then the wife’s, and it explores the fierce asymmetry of the two tellings. Groff’s language is precise, lyrical, rich, at once worldly and epically transfiguring.