Fate And Furies

Fate And Furies (2015) by Lauren Groff

Genre: Sprawling novel that tells the arc of a marriage from both perspectives, both life stories revealing new secrets about the relationship that ultimately leaves you less intrigued by the characters than you are impressed with the scope of the book itself.

Recommended for: Someone who loves ambitious works of literature and enjoys when a novel rewards a close reading by pinning huge twists and jaw-dropping moments to seemingly innocuous details earlier in the story.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

—

I once worked at a place that would be a lot of people’s dream job.

It wasn’t my dream job. I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life. Like plenty of people chipping away at creative pursuits and making progress, you’ll do a lot of work to keep yourself afloat. For example, I once managed a food truck park. I wouldn’t really consider this job all that different than that job in some ways. They both helped me along the way.

But the one I’m referring to is the type of place that certain people just want to get inside the building. In fact, you can pay for tours of the place I worked, and those tours went right by my desk. I say all of that to suggest that most people who worked there - or certainly a healthy number - were less nonchalant about the fact that they worked there. They probably wouldn’t have compared it to managing a food truck park. So maybe that feeling of working at a capital C “Cool” place, for quite a few years in the case of the person I’m about to describe, has something to do with the way I’m about to describe the person I’m about to describe.

And honestly, I like this person. I think they like me, which I can at least appreciate about someone. But they talked shit about just about every mutual person we had ever met, and many that we hadn’t. And when I say talk shit, I really mean they made fun of them. I generally humored this as tepidly as possible. I don’t really think any of these people would have expected me to go to bat for them.

It was in the cool, fancy cafeteria where they serve great food at this dream job while this person was making fun of someone when I had an obvious realization: This person definitely makes fun of me behind my back. Making fun of people behind their back is a pretty defining characteristic of this person, they are less close to me than plenty of the people I’ve heard them make fun of, and if I can take a moment to brag, I think there’s plenty about me to make fun of. The probability leaned in one clear direction.

There was only about 15 seconds of panic before I made shockingly easy peace with that idea. It was like I put my hands out in front of my mind and stopped it from wondering what exactly he was making fun of me for. Instead, I felt a gentle sense of superiority, like it’s nice to know that it doesn’t matter even a little bit.

That moment has always stuck with me. The inevitability of people talking about you behind your back. That’s just being one of the products of being known by people, even loved ones. There’s even a little bit of inevitability to the fact that we will talk about others behind their backs. I tell myself I should A.) try not to do it B.) feel a little bad for it and C.) only talk about loved ones with other people who love them, so that there is at least a rope you’re all instinctually holding on to that keeps you in bounds (but also see A and B).

If you don’t care what anyone thinks of you then I imagine none of this resonates with you. But that’s a defense mechanism, and people who don’t employ it might be worried a lot. It’s good to live a social life, and to just accept that what comes with it is plenty of stuff outside of our control. If it were in our control, it really wouldn’t be worth pursuing.

I tell myself that people probably talk about me behind my back here and there. It never happens as much as we worry about, but it happens. I always say that I hope what they’re saying isn’t too true or too untrue. Either of those would be pretty brutal.

—

I was about halfway through Fate and Furies when I saw that Obama recommended it as one of his books to read back in 2016. Real “I’m not a normal president; I’m a cool president” energy that guy brings to the table. Someone has sex or dies seemingly on almost every page.

There’s no denying it’s an extremely impressive novel. And when it comes to Graff’s writing, we’re grading on a curve. She’s talented in a way that makes you realize a lot of the novelists you read are lightweights.

But I can’t say the book really resonated with me. I don’t think it was supposed to be relatable, but the intensity with which it was not relatable sort of struck a negative chord with me, and at a certain point I wondered if normal people existed in the world created in this book, or if Graff’s ever met someone who’s ever had a nice day.

There’s a nastiness in the arc of these characters that might reflect reality in some ways but the text refuses to suggest that any of them are allowed to find everyday joy out in the world, away from the horrors of monstrous people. The love story is complex and intriguing, but we’re mostly supposed to just keep being asked to unwrap new layers of how fraught it is.

It’s worth making your own judgement. The twists and turns level up the stakes of the book every few hundred pages. There are a lot of perspectives that are commented on, somewhat brilliantly, but you have to buy into ideas like a protagonist who the entire world seems to say is not beautiful but is “interesting looking,” which is something that I’ve never heard someone earnestly say about a woman. I have no doubt that it has been said (or that women have to deal with backhanded compliments), but the premise that everyone who exists is terrible by nature (or else so cluelessly naive as to not see people for who they are) isn’t a benefit to any plot.