Reading Week!: Arcadia by Lauren Groff

As it is now my Reading Week, the mid-semester break which is supposed to be used for revision and coursework, I thought I would get into the spirit of the "Reading" part and start a little week-long series here on the blog. As you can probably guess I don't have much going on in my life at the moment, so these little things help to keep my evenings filled (I've given up TV for Lent, possibly even longer,  so I am devoting much more time to reading and writing). I will of course be doing a lot of reading for my seminars and my disseration, but I am also going to use this opportunity to read for pleasure. Here on the blog I will be using this space for some book reviews, reading updates, and other bookish things. So without further ado here is the first installment:

Review: Arcadia by Lauren Groff

I remember reading Lauren Groff's first novel The Monsters of Templeton several years ago and being quite impressed by it, not particularly amazed but I liked the book enough to be intrigued when I saw her second book on the shelves last year. Although I knew the book had received critical praise, I began reading without very high expectations (a book about growing up on a hippie commune didn't sound initially appealing, perhaps a little close to home as my brother had recently taken up residence in an 'eco-village' that resembled a commune a bit too closely and the family was not very happy about his lifestyle). I quickly realised, however, that this book was definitely going to be one to bypass all expectation and succeed in amazing me. 

The story follows Bit as he grows up on what we would call a "hippie commune" - free love, drugs, veganism, etc. This premise is unique enough to stand out, but what is really special about the novel is Lauren Groff's beautiful writing. It was the very first book I read on my Kindle and so I was only just getting used to the new method for taking notes and making highlights, but I still found plenty of passages to mark up. In fact I am planning on buying a physical copy when I return to America (not a fan of the UK cover) so that I can reread it and fully mark it up as I do to my most beloved books. Groff's descriptions of childhood are very real - she captures the tenderness and vulnerability of a child's formative years. Mixed into the opening passages of Bit's childhood are some intelligent musings on language and the power of words (the strange physicality and materiality of them), told through the perspective of a young boy just discovering both. 

The middle part of the novel loses some of the magic. This perhaps is a signal of Bit's growing up - he is less amazed by the world around him, an adolescent with a much more stark view of the work around him. The strength of the middle part is instead Bit's relationships to the other characters and the relationships that complicate the idealistic world of Arcadia. I was pleasantly surprised by the final part of the book - I won't give anything away, but I liked the way Groff addressed the idea of utopia - the flaws in an idealistic society and later the longing for a (lost? nostalgically imagined?) utopia in a faltering society. In the end, the novel doesn't quite regain the intuition, effortlessness, and finesse of the opening passages. I still gave Arcadia five stars, however, because all throughout Groff's writing is simply wonderful. As a whole picture showing the progression of Bit's life, the novel works very well. Even more than just the story of one man's journey from childhood to adulthood, however, Groff also gives us an opportunity to grapple with complex truths - "The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable," she observes, "It's a miracle that it exists at all."