From there, it’s only a short hop to New York, where she is robbed of her virginity by a sadistic aesthete – another cliche. Groff layers on the trauma so thick as to be implausible: formative events include the violent death of a sibling and abandonment by her parents, followed by years in the care of a French grandmother who is a prostitute and an uncle who is a crime boss with a Van Eyck masterpiece in a cupboard. But whereas Lotto’s childhood was full of the vivid sense-impressions typical of early memories, Mathilde’s biography feels cheap as well as cruel. It all makes more sense in the novel’s second half, when we discover just how much Mathilde has been hiding. The novel makes much of the dream couple’s good looks, energetic sex life and fidelity none of this compensates for their lack of emotional intimacy. But their first meeting sets the tone of a relationship that never feels fully inhabited by Groff, or accessible to her reader. Lotto is an actor (he will soon fail, and discover his gift for writing). He shouted up at her, ‘Marry me!’” Of course this is meant to be stagey. He fell to his knees and took Mathilde’s hands to press them on his heart. Also, how many people were watching them, how beautiful he and Mathilde looked together. A chilly, lonely spell is broken by more sex and admission to Vassar liberal arts college, where Lotto discovers acting and his future wife, Mathilde, at a party: “He felt the drama of the scene. This golden boy, or “shining one”, born in a hurricane, is adored by his parents and aunt until death intrudes, his mother metamorphoses from mermaid to beached whale, and he starts to drink and take drugs with the wrong crowd.Īn accident on the beach, a first experience of sex that makes him think of “mangoes, split papayas, fruits tart and sweet and dripping with juice”, and Lotto’s wayward, tropical youth is brought to an abrupt halt by his banishment to a boarding school in New England. Groff lives in Florida and the early section describing Lotto’s youth in her home state has a magic-realist flavour.

Lauren Groff’s fat novel Fates and Furies is the portrait of a marriage, seen from both sides: first his, then hers. I t starts with honeymoon sex on a cold New England beach, and ends with lonely old age in London decades later.

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