{"id":856,"date":"2012-04-16T14:47:02","date_gmt":"2012-04-16T19:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=856"},"modified":"2012-04-16T14:48:51","modified_gmt":"2012-04-16T19:48:51","slug":"a-review-of-arcadia-a-novel-by-lauren-goff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/reviews\/856\/a-review-of-arcadia-a-novel-by-lauren-goff","title":{"rendered":"A Review of Arcadia, a Novel by Lauren Goff."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Arcadia<\/a><\/em>, by Lauren Groff.\u00a0 Hyperion, March 13, 2012.\u00a0 304 pages, $25.99.<\/p>\n

When I was in graduate school at the University of Rochester in the late sixties, the embers of the Second Great Awakening were still smoldering to ash in upstate New York.\u00a0 Known as the burned-over district because it was aflame with religious fervor, western New York in the first half of the 19th century was as thick with prophets as the eastern Mediterranean had been in the early Christian era.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Just down the street from us, the elderly surviving women of a celibate sect that aimed to proselytize its way to heaven still walked the grounds of their compound in petticoats and bonnets.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mormonism is the most enduring vestige of the millenarian, perfectionist, and communitarian impulses that inspired such sects as the Shakers and the Millerites to dream of a better world a coming.\u00a0\u00a0 The alienated hippies and lefties of the nineteen-sixties would blow on those ancient embers and summon flames to light the way for a new generation of true believers.\u00a0 Communes sprang up all over the country, and the perceptive, artistically-inclined children raised in that world\u2014Storm Large or Joanna Rose, to take two local examples\u2014would make art from their complicated childhoods.<\/p>\n

Lauren Groff smartly sets Arcadia<\/em>, her fictional enquiry into this new age version of communal zeal, in that same region of upstate New York.\u00a0 Over nearly three hundred pages, she brilliantly evokes the earnest hopes and evaporating ideals of the communards.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Arcadia is seen through the eyes of Ridley Stone, a boy named for the town in Wyoming where he was born.\u00a0\u00a0 His birth interrupted his vagabond parents\u2019 travels from Oregon to Colorado, following their charismatic leader, a musician named Handy, who will continue to dominate life on the commune, a sort of benign good ol\u2019 boy version of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.\u00a0 Handy is not as malevolent or megalomaniacal as the Bhagwan, nor as theologically insistent, but he too claims his sexual privileges.\u00a0\u00a0 The group eventually finds property in upstate New York.\u00a0\u00a0 The boy believes he has memories of this pre-natal life.<\/p>\n

Because he is tiny, Ridley is known as Bit.\u00a0 When he\u2019s six he looks three.\u00a0 Enigmatic and precocious, Bit is admired by everyone, but he\u2019s especially beloved by women\u2014his mom and her fellow communards, the mysterious old lady he meets in the woods, the girls of his childhood.\u00a0\u00a0 Bit, however, is enchanted only with Helle, Handy\u2019s daughter, whose enigmatic spirit will bring Bit both joy and sorrow.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bit\u2019s story is told in four balanced chapters: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and middle age.\u00a0\u00a0 The book begins and ends in Arcadia, but Bit is always at the center of the narrative.\u00a0\u00a0 Bit and his parents, Hannah and Abe, live first in Ersatz Arcadia\u2014that is, a temporary Arcadia, the preamble phase awaiting the construction of permanent buildings the restoration of an abandoned manor house.\u00a0 Abe is the commune\u2019s master builder.\u00a0\u00a0 He suffers paralysis when he breaks his back in a fall from the roof, rushing to finish the work\u2014a sad symbol of powerlessness.\u00a0 Bit leaves the commune when he comes of age, but Arcadia’s life lessons, its approach to the proper ways of\u00a0living and\u00a0its modes of being never relinguish their grip on Bit’s soul.<\/p>\n

Groff\u2019s language in general echoes the voice and tone of a fable, much like those in the mysterious book of fairy tales she has Bit discover when he’s a child.\u00a0\u00a0 As Bit creates his new life in the larger world, the language of Arcadia <\/em>is by turns more mundane and less arch, less intuitive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Groff likes to convert nouns and adjectives into verbs, a technique that takes some getting used to.\u00a0 For example, when Bit senses something wrong that he can\u2019t quite put his finger on, Groff writes that this feeling \u201cvagues in an out.\u201d\u00a0 Kids at the swimming hole \u201ccome sealing wetly up out of the water.\u201d\u00a0 Daylight \u201csyrups the valley.\u201d\u00a0 The car \u201cgentles off.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Rain drops \u201cbullet overhead.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bit attracts the attention of women, but passively rebuffs\u00a0their overtures.\u00a0 He suffers heartache\u00a0induced by \u00a0Helle, but soldiers on.\u00a0 When Bit returns to what\u2019s left of the Arcadian experiment to nurse his dying mother, he reconnects with the boy he was and settles into the man he has become.\u00a0 This chapter is set in the future, in the midst of a global pandemic, but Groff doesn\u2019t worry much about this big picture, accounting for the arc of global disaster instead with simple ledgers of calamity.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Domesticity sets the agenda for Bit\u2019s life and thus for the novel examining it.\u00a0\u00a0 He never really fits into the \u201coutside\u201d world.<\/p>\n

There is a lot to admire in Arcadia<\/em>.\u00a0 Groff imagines a plausible version of a child’s coming of age in a commune, but I never found myself fully engaged with the characters.\u00a0\u00a0 The brilliance of the language sometimes hits the reader in the eye like a spotlight in a dark room, when what we need to see is light from\u00a0a simple overhead bulb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arcadia, by Lauren Groff.\u00a0 Hyperion, March 13, 2012.\u00a0 304 pages, $25.99. When I was in graduate school at the University… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":858,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2012\/04\/Arcadia-cover.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":863,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions\/863"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}