We Are Stardust We Are Golden

Arcadia a novel by Lauren Groff.  Hachette Books.  289 pp.  $16.99 *****

In rummaging around on the Internet, looking for information about Lauren Groff, I happened upon a video of a reading where she says her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds, is her best.  If that’s so, it is one mighty book, because Arcadia is a masterpiece, the best and most realized of the four books I’ve read.  I’ve just started The Vaster Wilds, and am impressed.  But I can’t imagine it exceeds the scope of Arcadia.

In this novel Groff, born in 1978, takes on my generation (I was born 30 years earlier), and got it dead right.  Arcadia captures the Sixties in a way that few novels have.  It concerns a commune founded around 1968 on six hundred acres of real estate in upper New York State, Groff’s stomping grounds (she comes from Cooperstown).  It was apparently based on The Farm, a famous commune in Tennessee during that same period, founded by Stephen Gaskin and his wife Ina Mae, who is still alive (Gaskin died in 2014).  I heard of The Farm when I was young, but was never much interested.  I’m more a hermit than a communard.

But I talk to my wife about what I’m reading, often while we take walks, and she told me—or perhaps reminded me; I must have heard this story before—that she visited The Farm in the mid-seventies, when she had dropped out of UNC and was figuring out what to do.  She worked for a small magazine called The Sun, which has since burgeoned into a major publication, and she and editor Sy Safransky thought it might be interesting to visit The Farm and write about it.  She took a bus there and stayed for a few days, finding the place amazingly well-organized.  Almost immediately they plugged her in and found work for her and a place to stay.  By the third evening someone was offering her marijuana, and she mentioned, quite casually, that she might want to write about the commune for this little magazine.  That set off an alarm in the family she was living with, and by the next morning she was on a bus headed back to North Carolina.  Major paranoid vibes, man.  They didn’t want anyone writing about what they were doing.[1]

Groff’s Gaskin figure is named Handy, who is a musician and a charismatic spiritual leader; his wife Astrid is a midwife (like Ina Mae) and has turned out a number of children herself.  A master builder named Abe accompanies him, along with his wife Hannah, and their son (Little) Bit, who was the first child born in the community.  There is a cast of dozens, but I assumed from the start that Groff didn’t intend for us to keep track of everyone.  Groff chooses—brilliantly, I would say—to focus on Bit, at various stages of his life: as a small boy, the first one born into the community; a young teenager, dealing with the conflicting loyalties to his family and the place; a young man, sprung from the commune into the real world (it was like leaving a prison for the outside, except that he’d hardly seen the outside); and a middle-aged professor looking back on his life.  Daringly, Groff sets this final period in 2018, though the novel was published in 2012.  It’s amazing how much she gets right.  She didn’t imagine the Trump presidency, of course.  She wasn’t writing horror.

This novel isn’t just about the commune.  It’s about the whole Sixties dream, and what it did to someone who was raised in it.

As the novel opens, Bit is three or four years old, taking things in but still, for some reason, non-verbal.  Handy goes off with his musicians on one last tour to raise money (everyone who lives there has donated everything they own, trust funds and all); for a while they’d been a traveling troupe looking for a place, but one person in the group had a father who, finally reconciling with his hippie son, donated the 600 acres, including various dilapidated structures.  One huge mansion in particular seemed a likely home base, and while Handy was away, Bit’s father Abe determined to have the place ready to move into by the time the man gets back (an overweening ambition.  The place is in dreadful shape).  We occupy Bit’s consciousness during this period, when Abe is in his prime and his wife Hannah, more an intellectual than a doer, is also active (she has contributed major money) but is apparently suffering from seasonal affective disorder, so she spends a lot of time in bed.

Handy’s idea is to embody the Sixties vision in a place.  Everyone will share everything, including work; children will live with their parents for a while, but eventually occupy a dorm together; no one will be excluded, not even (what we now call) homeless people and addicts, people newly out of prison, nature worshipers and nudists, whatever.  The vision was utopian, and entirely admirable.

The problem—as always—was that, though Handy proclaimed equality, he saw himself as slightly superior.  When my wife was at the Farm, one thing that turned her off was the reverential way people referred to Gaskin, as if he were a prophet.  Handy didn’t like challenges to his authority.  He actually seemed disturbed, when he got back from his tour, that Abe had completed his renovation project.  It wasn’t Handy’s idea so he didn’t like it.

Abe is the practical person, Handy the visionary.  By the time Bit is a teenager, Abe can see that, however wonderful the dream, it has to be tempered by reality; the place is running out of money and can’t accept every stoned hippie who shows up wanting to chill out.  Their massive mansion is bursting at the seams, and people are living all over the grounds.  By then it is the early eighties, when Reagan was clamping down on drugs.  Afraid of the authorities—who were keeping an eye on the place—Handy orders everyone to stop growing marijuana.  He doesn’t convene his council to make this decision; he issues an edict.  Abe decides to grow his own stash as a source of income for the group.  He enlists his wife and son in this enterprise.  They are in the commune but not quite of it.

Bit in the meantime is falling in love with Halle, Handy’s daughter.  She is in full adolescent rebellion to her parents (in a place where sex and drugs are widely available) and sees the hypocrisies and flaws in her father better than anyone else.  She’s also a troubled soul, a girl in conflict with herself.  If you could advise Bit, you would say: this isn’t the girl to fall in love with.  An older woman who mentors him says as much.  But romance isn’t an area where people commonly take advice.

The story of such a place doesn’t end when the commune comes to an end (as it inevitably does when someone dies during a major celebration, and the police show up and start arresting people, including Handy, whose name is on the lease).  It continues as Bit becomes a photographer (an interest he acquired at the commune) and tries to live an artistic life in the world, still imbued with the values he grew up with but trying to put them into practice in a place where they seem foreign.  He is also a single parent trying to raise a daughter.  In the novel’s final section, that daughter is a teenager, and she reluctantly moves with her father to care for his mother, who is living in a small house on the communal property and facing death.

Much of what I’ve written here sounds like plot summary, but it is the plot that I find especially brilliant, in addition to the writing.  I’ve avoided any number of spoilers, so I’ve left out important details about Abe, Hannah, Halle, Bit’s daughter: the whole thing is a much more complicated tangle than I’ve suggested.  I will mention that in the 2018 section there is a major pandemic, involving a strange respiratory disease no one understands.  It is stunning how accurate that is.  Groff only missed by a matter of months.

I haven’t mentioned the wise old crone like figure who lived on the outskirts of the commune and was extremely important to Bit and his family all their lives.  She was a kind of prophet, and saw the limitations of the whole enterprise.  And I haven’t mentioned the Amish people who surrounded the commune, who showed up at some vital moments and had their own things to say, from the standpoint of a utopian community that has worked out remarkably well for many generations.  As one of those women says toward the end: “Too much freedom, it rots things in communities, quick.  That was the problem with your Arcadia.”

I’m afraid I agree.  I always found Abe more sympathetic than Handy.  But I appreciated the vision.  I still do.

[1] The Sun did eventually feature Stephen Gaskin in various articles.  https://thesunmagazine.org/search?search=Stephen+Gaskin&with=section%2Ccategories%2Ccontributors&useShould=true&type=article