ICYMI: Lauren Groff explores the secrets, lies, and different lived experiences of spouses in a decades-long marriage in this dual-perspective novel.
Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.
Like all marriages, Lotto and Mathilde's is made up of two stories: each of their unique experienced realities of the relationship. In Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff explores Lotto and Mathilde both inside and outside of the marriage.
The couple was married and deeply in love at the tender age of 22. As time passed, their dynamics became more complicated, tangled in the messiness of growing up together. They formed more full versions of themselves as individuals--versions that sometimes pushed against the marriage itself.
The first section felt long and didn't fully hook me, but the change of perspective in the second half and the various denouements revealed there did.
I'm not often a fan of omniscient asides, and those pulled me out of the first section of the novel and felt like interruptions. But the revealed backstory in the second part of the novel was dark and strange and creepy, with surprises and twists that intrigued me.
In the end, I was more taken with the writing voice than the story being told, and the writing made me want to read other novels by Groff.
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Groff is also the author of The Vaster Wilds, Florida, Matrix, Arcadia, The Monsters of Templeton, and other books.