Life is rigorous for the seven dozen and counting residents of her titular would-be utopia: war veterans, band groupies and Ph.D. Surely, one would be hard-pressed to discern so much as a sigh of nostalgia for paradise lost in Groff's determinedly unsentimental rendering of an upstate New York collective. In "Arcadia," which traces the rise and descent of a commune through three Republican administrations and into an imagined near future, Groff gives this oft-lampooned chapter in America's evolution her solemn and undivided attention.
While the particulars of mom's hippie moment got sidelined for the greater good of the author's sprawling family chronicle, one came away with a sense that the author had more than a passing interest in that countercultural flowering. In Groff's debut novel "The Monsters of Templeton," in which an archaeology student dug her shovel into her hometown's past and turned up centuries of buried secrets, the one character who managed to upstage a colorful throng of dead ancestors was the protagonist's very-much-alive mother, a reformed free spirit who emerged from her whoopie-making days on a commune with a born-again religious zeal.
Who hasn't wanted to time-machine themselves back to a day when all was presumably much more splendid and sympathetic to the inner romantic (or Luddite) in oneself that feels perpetually out of sync with the modern world? Who hasn't claimed that they have missed a boat that, invariably, seems to have set sail just before one's generation?įor Lauren Groff, that ship docked some 10 years before her birth, during the Woodstock heyday of peaceniks, free love and all-the-tempeh-you-can-eat.
As Woody Allen intimated so charmingly in "Midnight in Paris," everyone is subject to the occasional fit of epoch envy.
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