The first time I read Lauren Groff’s Monster’s of Templeton, I paused on the 1st page to the realization that the last original plot had been written in the opening sentence–“the day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass”. So when I heard that Lauren Groff had released her second novel, I didn’t know if I should anticipate a second book to rival the first, or disappointment. Nothing could have prepared me, however, for how quickly Arcadia swept me up.
Arcadia follows Bit, a boy born into a 1970s commune (from which the book derives its title), as he grows up in the microcosm of hippie culture and is spit out after the world his parents built collapses. Where many authors would revert to caricature, Lauren Groff weaves Arcadia a culture all its own, where “the women wash clothes and linens in the frigid river, beat wet fabric against the rocks. In the last light, shadows [grow] from their knees and the current sparkle[s] with suds”.
Bit has the honor of being the first child born into Arcadia, the son of two of the founding members. His childhood is one of springtime plantings, birthings, hungry winters, breakfasts of soy-eggs and fresh baked bread. He is witness to the rise and fall of Arcadia. The most steadfast of all the members.
The story jumps to the present. Bit has accustomed himself to the world outside of Arcadia and is living in post 9/11 New York City, teaching the lost art of dark room photography. He is a man steeped in the past; caught in the dichotomy of his childhood and his present life.
The book concludes in 2018; the effects of global warming have begun to chip away at the culture with which we ourselves are familiar. Within Lauren Groff’s imagined future, we return one last time to Arcadia. “The sun and wind pour into the sheets on the line. There are bodies in the billowing, forms created and lost in a breath”.
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