Three years after the release of her novel Fates and Furies—a literary bisection of marriage and privilege that was praised variously by President Barack Obama and Amazon (yes, Amazon) as the best book of 2015—Lauren Groff was sitting in a lecture theater at Harvard University, thinking about medieval nuns. She wasn’t in the market for a new book. She usually has a dozen or so different concepts in different stages of fruition orbiting within the solar system of her mind. But something about the lecture, by the academic Katie Bugyis on the 12th-century poet Marie de France, caught her imagination, and suddenly she saw the scope of an idea laying itself out before her, striking and luminous in its framework. Sitting in the audience, Groff could feel the energy reverberating between the past and the present, “almost like a tuning fork,” she told me later. And she got up, and she started to work.
The temptation with writers who see the world clearly is to attribute some kind of supernatural sight to them when their real gift is rigorous attentiveness to humanity. When Groff detailed the origins of Matrix, her new novel, I joked that it sounded like she’d had a vision. “It was a very 21st-century vision,” she said dryly. “It was just sitting there. There were no, like, humanoid forms in the sky.” Still, throughout Groff’s career, her novels have been a good few beats ahead of the most pressing issues of the moment. Pandemics recur in her stories, as do natural landscapes ravaged by climate change, as do women who are quietly incandescent with rage. Her 2012 novel, Arcadia, about a boy who grows up in a hippie commune in upstate New York, jumps forward in its final section to 2019, when a new virus that first appears in Indonesia shuts down the planet and kills close to a million people. In the same dystopian future, coastlines are battered by storms, ice caps have melted, and formerly balmy places are unlivable. Arcadia, Groff said, was her darkest nightmare, projected onto the page. Even she didn’t expect it would so fully come true.
Lauren Groff wants us all to keep more secrets. And even though she wrote one of the most significant marriage novels of the past decade, 2015's Fates and Furies, she's not sure she wants us to join in holy matrimony, either. "I wrote the book in opposition to marriage," she says of Fates, her portrait of a relationship on fire told by a wife who knows it and a husband who does not. "Even though I am married, I don't necessarily believe in the institution — its patriarchal elements, the idea that you can't keep things from your significant other — and I was hoping to sort out the need for it."
Finland is a place of extreme contrasts. It's a land of vast arctic wildernesses and cultured civilised hubs. It is lauded for its education, quality of life and economic dynamism but its people have been prone to depression. It has long, light summers and cold, dark winters. It is fiercely independent, yet has a long history of occupation. But it is the reconciliation of these opposites that has shaped the nation, and there is a Finnish book that encapsulates the push and pull of these contrasts. It is also credited with turning Finland into one of the most literate nations on earth.
The great thing about egg rice is that it’s hardly cooking. If you can fry an egg, then you can make egg rice. And it’s filling but not too filling, perfect for that weird in-between pause after work and before dinner, when you’re so hungry you can’t imagine how you’ll even make it to dinner, let alone cook it.
It has been a point of contention among historians whether the medieval convent was a virtual prison for the unwanted sisters and daughters of the wealthy or, instead, a locus for female intellectual life. Most likely they were both. Groff is skillful at conveying Marie’s initial despair: “All will be gray, she thinks, the rest of her life gray. Gray soul, gray sky, gray earth of March, grayish whitish abbey.”
“Harrow” unfolds on a ruined continent where environmental devastation has changed everything but also nothing; the zoos may “have been washed away” and the coasts flooded, yet “[p]retty much everything is up and running again. The amusement industry has heroically reestablished itself. Disney World has rebooted and is going strong.” Williams’ tone is caustic and discomfiting; it brings to mind the moment in which we are living, when matters of science and public health are regularly ridiculed or redirected in favor of political or economic platitudes.
“The Oracle of Night” makes a resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams. Ribeiro marshals prodigious evidence to bolster his case that a dream is not simply “fragments of memory assembled at random” (as he summarizes Francis Crick’s dismissive position), but instead is a “privileged moment for prospecting the unconscious” — a phenomenon that, in Carl Jung’s words, “prepares the dreamer for the events of the following day.”