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The members of my Book Riot IRL book group have been raving about this book by Lauren Groff since our first meeting back in September, so I finally decided to go ahead and read it. It was very good, although I don’t think I loved it as much as everyone else did.
I will give the book credit for engaging my interest almost immediately. It’s about a marriage and the first half, titled “Fates”, is told in third person limited from the point of view of the husband, Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite. It briefly discusses his parents, how they got together in Florida, his childhood there, his father’s death, and his brief juvenile delinquency which got him sent to a boarding school in New England.
Towards the end of his senior year of college he meets Mathilde, a gorgeous blond whom he falls in love with on site and marries two weeks later.
Lotto comes from a lot of money, so of course there’s speculation that Mathilde is just another gold digger. It doesn’t help that Lotto is a hopeless optimist who only sees the good in people. With this suspicion, Lotto’s mother disinherits him until he divorces Mathilde. Lotto won’t do that so he and Mathilde set off to make a life of their own.
Mathilde supports them while he tries unsuccessfully to make it as an actor until they discover he’s really a playwright. He finds success, critical acclaim, fame and fortune in this new venture and he and Mathilde get to live more or less happily ever after until he dies of an aneurism just months after his mother dies.
That’s about half way through the book and the second half is told from Mathilde’s perspective. The second half is titled “Furies” and I have no doubt Groff had every intention of referencing the Greek goddesses of vengeance with this title. This section of the book picks up right where the first half left off and shows Mathilde’s all-consuming grief after her husband’s death, but it also includes flashbacks to her childhood and her marriage with Lotto.
Mathilde believes herself a villain capable of doing terrible evil. She certainly does some evil things, but she’s not an evil person. Rather, she was made to believe she was evil by the way her family treated her after a childhood accident. She really loved Lotto with all her heart, but she’s also not afraid to seek vengeance, whether it’s on her husband’s behalf or her own.
In the second half of the book we learn about all the pies Mathilde had her fingers in without Lotto ever knowing. She secretly edited Lotto’s plays for him while he slept. She pulled some strings and was responsible for the first production of Lotto’s first play. All through their marriage, she was in contact with Lotto’s mother, who tried to buy Mathilde off when she first heard they were married. Mathilde took her vengeance by quietly and subtly making sure Lotto never went back to Florida.
She is a force to be reckoned with and all the more dangerous for the way she does everything behind the scenes. She’s not famous, other than as Lotto’s wife. No one interviews her, or really knows anything about her. As a result, no one suspects her of being dangerous until after she’s already struck, by which time it’s too late.
I admired and felt sorry for Mathilde all at once, and I could probably say the same of Lotto, though for very different reasons. This story is about a strange marriage with a lot of secrets, but it’s not about two people living miserably ever after. They really do love each other and, despite all impressions to the contrary, they make the perfect match because each makes the other the best version of themselves.
What did you guys read this week? Anything that others recommended to you? I want to hear all about it!