Theater references and a portrait of a perfectly imperfect marriage

When I first finished this book, I *thought* I had a lot of strong opinions about it. Like, “Lotto is EXHAUSTING!”, or “These lucky bitches have a Shiba Inu puppy, and what do I have? Nothing!” But now, I’ve sat on it for a week, and all I can really muster for Fates and Furies is a “Meh.”

I’m on record somewhere claiming that I love character-driven work, but also elsewhere claiming that a truly compelling plot can make me overlook deficiencies in other areas (like character definition.) Because I’m obsessive, I made a flow chart that kind of clarifies my feelings:

The problem with Fates and Furies is that by the time I got to Mathilde’s section in the second half of the book, I was turned off by Lotto and had become profoundly uninterested in their story as a couple. It’s not that Lotto was ill-defined; both he and Mathilde both demonstrate Groff’s aptitude for creating three-dimensional characters, to her credit. It’s just that his narcissism and the special brand of obliviousness that results from being so completely absorbed in your own perspective are frustrating to read. Again, credit to Groff, because she could have sketched Lotto as a complete asshole, but he’s not even that — he’s earnest, energetic, charismatic, popular, and unquestionably in love with his wife. But even as he draws people to him and effortlessly wins friends, the truth is that the relationships aren’t really reciprocal. Everyone exists for Lotto to affirm his goodness and his talent, and even though all he ever really has to do for people to like him is show up, he doesn’t even always do that if he doesn’t feel like it. He puts Mathilde on a pedestal, but in doing so, he fails to appreciate her as a person — including her faults — and instead exalts her serene, wifely purity and unconditional support of him. It’s a trap that so many well-meaning men fall into, because in all of their sincere declarations of love for women, it’s still a reductionist tactic that depreciates our humanity by focusing on gender-essentialist stereotypes.

So it was with all of that weariness that I finally reached Mathilde’s POV, and though I liked her and sympathized with her, I was pretty prepared for the gist of what I got. Surprise! She’s not a perfect angel! Surprise, she does a LOT of the emotional (and, occasionally, professional) labor behind the scenes that keeps the marriage intact and their lives comfortably afloat. I mean, the details of her upbringing and life pre-Lotto were news (pretty tragic news,) but the broad strokes were expected.

One positive comment on the book as a whole is that I was expecting the Gone Girl-esque approach of slowly unraveling the façade of the marriage to reveal a deeply unhappy couple, but that’s not exactly the case. For the most part, Lotto and Mathilde are functional and in love, but there are compromises that were made — mostly on Mathilde’s part — over their decades together that ring true, but are less sensational than seething hatred.

Books like this — like so many that populate the ‘literary fiction’ genre — often typify a kind of pretension, not even on the part of the author, but from the literary community at large, that suggests that these ‘slice of life’ stories teach us something valuable about the human condition, about society, about ourselves and our relationships; therefore, they are inherently valuable, and moreso than other stories that just tell a story. I disagree for two reasons, and, referring back to my flow chart, that’s part of why my taste can be mostly defined in such a pedestrian manner. In the first place, it’s just elitist nonsense to suggest that just a good story, independent of other merits, doesn’t have value. In the second place, so many of these lit fic slice of life stories are, in fact, really specific to a certain experience, or not really representative of an authentic experience at all, and so defining themselves as broadly applicable is a kind of arrogant position maintained by the privileged creative class. Is there something that I should have taken away from Fates and Furies to apply to my own life? Should the book have taught me something new about the nature of love and marriage? Is Lotto and Mathilde’s marriage an existential case study? I can’t say I feel newly educated, but here’s the NYT book review, claiming Fates and Furies“insist[s] that the examination of a long-term relationship can be a perfect vehicle for exploring no less than the nature of existence — the domestic a doorway to the philosophical.”

I mean, I guess. I just read a book about a self-absorbed playwright and his patient but not saintly wife, but everyone gets to choose their own adventure.