FATES AND FURIES by Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies follows a married couple, Lotto and Mathilde, through their lives, both together and apart. Part One (Fates) belongs to Lotto, a charismatic man who grew up the wealthy heir of a bottled water fortune. When he marries Mathilde straight out of college, though, his mother cuts him off. In spite of their newly impoverished state, the couple is happy, the envy of all their friends. To Lotto, Mathilde is the purest person he’s ever met — kind, patient, intelligent. She remains that way in his eyes nearly to the end of his life, when his lifelong friend betrays one of her darkest secrets. In Part Two (Furies), Mathilde tells her side of the story, revealing that, although she and her husband knew each other intimately, they both kept secrets, some more sinister than others. While the events in this book often struck me as improbable — some truly unusual things happen to both Lotto and Mathilde — overall, I found it to be a deep and absorbing look at the intricacies of marriage. Groff’s writing is beautiful, and she sucked me right into the story with her sharp prose and memorable metaphors (“he felt carbonated with dark ideas” or, my personal favorite, “the soulless third circle of hell that is New York City”). Her descriptions can be over-the-top at times, but in the end she paints a compelling portrait of a marriage — both the shiny surface and the turmoil underneath.