Lauren Groff reads at Greenlight Bookstore Wed 28. She has won The Story Prize and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It’s a world that, in some ways, is easier to imagine than the utopian dream of half a century ago. Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of four novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies and Matrix, and two short story collections, Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. As the author’s lovely language both surprises and lulls, the story moves to a believable future severely affected by global warming and epidemics. With Bit as something of a nonparticipant, the book’s best character is Hannah when illustrating Hannah’s decline, Groff is at her best. The dilemma at the core of Arcadia is the choice between freedom and community and, beyond that, the different ways to create a utopia. At the same time his mother, Hannah, is being slowly betrayed by her aging body. As Bit assimilates to life on the outside, he comes into his own as a photographer, observing and documenting the world around him but not acting on it. Lauren Groff is the author, most recently, of Matrix.

The novel opens on a hippie communea sunny and idyllic place of bare breasts, fertile. The reader sees this through the eyes of the diminutive outsider Bit, who spends his kidhood in Arcadia and subsequently flees the commune with his disillusioned parents. Things fall apart in Arcadia, the 1960s utopia of Lauren Groff’s third book. Strong ideals need strong people to uphold them, and Arcadia crumbles when faced with forces much bigger and more powerful than the splintering collective. My misery was compounded because I was working on my second novel, Arcadia, a book that I undertook in order to wrestle with the moral implications of bringing a child into a world in which. The novel opens on a hippie commune-a sunny and idyllic place of bare breasts, fertile gardens and hard work well rewarded-and tracks its deterioration into a sinister place of drugs, hunger, filth and rotting power structures. Things fall apart in Arcadia, the 1960s utopia of Lauren Groff’s third book.

Arcadia by lauren groff