Fates and Furies a novel by Lauren Groff.  Riverhead Books 390 pp.  $18.00.  *****

First I’ll mention the things I don’t like.  Fates and Furies seems way overwritten, with various neologisms and startling turns of phrase.  Some readers love that stuff.  To me the author is trying too hard.  Many of the characters—the two main ones to be sure, but also most of the supporting cast—are so exceptional, or so eccentric, that it seems odd that they’ve all managed to come together.  Does everybody in this novel have to be super-talented or extremely good-looking (it’s like a Hollywood movie)?

I love to read about sex, but this is the most hyper-sexed novel I can remember, and they never do it in a bed if they can find a sand dune or the top of a roof or a chair to drape over, or, on many occasions a wall to do it against.  (It’s called going to bed, not hitting the wall.)  I’m not objecting, exactly.  I’m just not sure I believe it (by “it” I mean all of the above).  Lauren Groff is brimming with talent as a novelist, and she wants us to know it.  She doesn’t want us to forget it for a single paragraph.

Yet this is the most compulsively readable book I’ve encountered in many a moon.  I couldn’t wait to pick it up every night.  I resented nights—like the evening when I teach a class, or watch a movie or a ball game—when I didn’t get to read.  If I were the kind of person who stays up all night to read a book, I would long since have done that.

Fates and Furies is famously a novel about a marriage, told first from the husband’s point of view, then from the wife’s.  It’s quite literally a book about love at first sight, I would even say first glance (even that is exceptional!), on a night when they are both about to graduate from Vassar.  Lotto (a nickname for Lancelot) is the most talented actor at the place, finishing up his college career with Hamlet, while Mathilde is a mysterious figure who has worked as a model but doesn’t have many friends.  The two of them immediately become a couple, and within a couple of weeks they’re married, even though—need I state the obvious?—they don’t know each other, and there was no reason to get married.  As we soon find out, Lotto has basically had the pick of every woman he ever wanted, all his life.  And he wanted them all.  (Sexually transmitted disease doesn’t exist in this fictional universe.  Anybody I knew who acted like Lotto had herpes at a bare minimum.  Pardon the expression).

They graduate from college, and Lotto sets out to become the world-famous actor everyone assumes he will be, and pretty much flops completely.  He gets enough roles to keep him trying but not to keep them in groceries, so Mathilde has to take a job.  Eventually Lotto winds up sitting around a lot, eating and drinking too much (there’s a massive amount of drinking in this novel; Groff is up there with Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Hemingway in alcohol consumption), and going to fat.  Now this is an interesting story, I thought to myself, the college hot shot who doesn’t live out his promise.

Just when the plot seemed to be thickening, Lotto, in a drunken stupor, composes the first few scenes of a play—he seems not even to remember it the next morning—and Mathilde finds the draft and realizes, my God, my husband is a great playwright, on a par with O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.  Oh hell, I thought.  What looked like an examination of failure has turned back into a celebration of brilliance and success.

We read scenes from a number of Lotto’s plays.  It may be that we’re supposed to assess their excellence (I don’t see how we can do that without seeing more) but mostly I noticed the way his own life fed into the plays in ingenious ways.  He apparently went from one success to another, and when, sometime in middle age, his inspiration failed, Mathilde dragged him to an opera, and he decided to write a libretto.  (The whole section in which he composes the opera, and deals with a younger musician he is working with, is fascinating, though beyond my understanding of music.)

There’s a major shift a little past midway through the novel, and it would be a spoiler to say what it is.  We move from Lotto’s point of view to Mathilde’s, to her view of the marriage we’ve been seeing from his standpoint, and the differences are startling.  Groff is pointing out how two people, even two people who love each other, can have far different experiences of the same situation.  We also hear Mathilde’s personal story, which is sad almost beyond belief, and we understand how her past has played into shaping the present.  It may be my imagination, but this part of the novel also seemed less overwritten, almost as if the high style of the first half imitated something about Lotto’s consciousness.  Mathilde may not have his brilliance, but she is the grounding force her husband needed.

The second half is the Furies section of the novel.  For various understandable reasons (once we know her story), Mathilde is a vindictive person, against people who betrayed her—there have been several—and those who attacked her husband.  A certain portion of her life involves taking revenge, and it makes sense that she would want to.  But she eventually sees that such activity is damaging her own character, and not accomplishing much.  In a way, though Lotto was the famous playwright, Mathilde is the more interesting human being.

I haven’t given up my early quibbles, but I think Lauren Groff is a remarkable novelist, and if she overdoes things from time to time, so be it.  She’s written a number of highly acclaimed books, and stands as one of the most important writers of her generation.  I look forward to more.