Good books always leave a kind of nimbus behind in the mind of the reader; you keep on thinking about them, perhaps puzzzling over them, long after they're finished. One such novel is Arcadia by Lauren Groff, the story of Bit Stone, a boy born and brought up in a 1970s commune in New York State. The first child born to the group, Bit is premature and small for his age, something of a visionary child living in his own world, but it's his relationships with the women in his life, both in the commune and after the commune falls apart that form the heart of the book.
There's no real plot, which will annoy some people, and the novel is written in a lyrical, somewhat elegiacal tone, which will annoy others. Bit is no action hero and thank goodness for that, and we perceive the story entirely through him. He enshrines his childhood in the commune as his happiest time, but others think differently. Helle, the girl he grows up with in the commune, on the past:
"Oh, Bit. I can't believe you don't remember. It was cold... We were never warm. We never had enough to eat. We never had enough clothes. I had to wake up every single night to someone fucking someone...Everywhere I was smelled like spunk. "
I liked the intensity of the descriptions, the physicality of everday things, cooking, sleeping, washing clothes, eating, which make the novel's subjects seem at once both super-real and dreamlike. Quite different to any fiction I've read in a long time. Recommended to those who like quiet, thought-inducing books.
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