Lotto, and I mean this in the best possible way, reads like a person who feels endlessly incomplete.

He holds antiquated views despite loving a powerful woman, he wishes for purity in his wife, and he refuses to really interact with who she is, often making up stories about her past, a past that she does not offer up freely to him. While sculpted as a fully three-dimensional character, Lotto functions wonderfully as this vessel of familiar actions for a lot of men. Central to his story, and Groff deserves endless praise for this, are very male themes of over-attachment, the tendencies of men to view women as soteriological figures rather than flawed humans, and loneliness. Lotto is a former evangelical who is shipped to an all boys school after he falls into a crowd that his overbearing mother disapproves of. Fates is told predominantly from the perspective of the husband in our focal marriage, Lotto (a sobriquet for Lancelot).

Yet the question Fates and Furies asks even more is whether or not these secret selves that we keep from even our closest loved ones can make us unlovable or even “bad.”įar from a linear novel, Fates and Furies is split into two portions: Fates and (you guessed it) Furies. That to encounter the truth of someone is sometimes unbearable, and that what is hidden from view is often hidden for a reason. This is not a novel of an interesting marriage as much as it is a novel of how we need and hold on to our ideas of other people in order so that we may function as people.

Lauren Groff takes two people and lays them bare, going into exuberant detail as to convey to her readers not only the characters of Lotto and Mathilde, but how both characters view one another. Instead it does something far more interesting. Really good.įates and Furies is indeed about a marriage, but it is not a novel of marriage that is interested in taking marriage and making it scandalous in some way (See above). Well, before I go any further in this short explication, let me put it succinctly. I cannot imagine the number of people that have turned down the opportunity to read it after being turned off by the sensationalized back cover. It makes Fates and Furies into something it is not, namely a hyper-gendered, melodramatic romance novel. Once again, however, I have to scold the person who wrote the blurb on the back. Maybe she is a lesbian who married by mistake but refuses to do something that would make him unhappy because, after all, she does love him. Maybe he is gay and she lets him do what he does on the side for the sake of their marriage. Maybe they are both unfaithful and that’s why it works.

Fates and Furies, if a person was to read the back cover and take a guess at what it is about, appears, more than anything, to be a classic love story.

Mathilde fates and furies