Page by page through Lauren Groff’s story about a hippie commune in western New York, I kept worrying that it was too good to last. Not the commune — it’s a mess from the start — I’m talking about the novel, which unfolds one moment of mournful beauty after another. As she did in her inventive debut, “The Monsters of Templeton” (2008), Groff once again gives us a young person — in this case a boy — struggling to understand himself and his peculiar history. But this time, she’s moved beyond the legends of James Fenimore Cooper that infused “Monsters” and taken on the more universal myth of paradise lost.
Stories about utopian settlements usually suffer from our dyspeptic need to humble anyone suspected of radical idealism. Nathaniel Hawthorne set the national tone early by satirizing his comrades’ credulity in “The Blithedale Romance.” Nowadays, as we take our solitary way, disparaging the naivete of 1970s communes offers liberals and conservatives a rare “Kumbaya” moment. For anyone still naive enough to feel nostalgic about free-love merrymakers, T.C. Boyle’s “Drop City” was, like, a total buzz kill, man, and at first Groff, who has published stories in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and “The Best American Short Stories,” seems to be strumming the same lament. But “Arcadia” offers something surprising: if not a redemption of utopian ideals, then at least a complicated defense of the dream.
At 33, Groff can barely remember the Village People, let alone Woodstock, but in her second novel she’s constructed an entirely believable settlement of Free People dedicated to “Equality, Love, Work, Openness to the Needs of Everyone” — a veritable Republican nightmare. The story begins when Bit Stone is 5 years old, “a mote of a boy,” living in bliss with his parents and a few dozen fellow vegetarians on 600 acres of natural beauty — and pot. “We are a hive,” Bit thinks in amazement. Their leader is a rock star who’s already served time for possession and seems determined to keep the group from taking any practical steps toward sustainability or independence from his laid-back tyranny.
With Creative Critiques, Vision Quests and communal birthings in the nude, these beatniks make ripe targets for satire, although Groff rarely plays them for laughs. “Arcadia” is too melancholy for that. The herbal optimism of these young men and women arrives already cast in the shadow of failure. It’s the age-old problem of utopian designs: Who wants to clean the kitchen while everybody else is getting high with a little help from their friends? While they lazily try to grow vegetables in their own waste, starvation is a real possibility; malnutrition is a fact. The risks are even more harrowing for the children left untended by intoxicated parents: sex abuse, poison, fire. This is only paradise if you’re stoned.
Or a boy like Bit. While we sense “the layered tensions of Arcadia” playing out in the background, Groff keeps us focused on the visceral wonder this child feels. “The world contracts in a friendly way around him,” she writes. Small and quiet, he’s a woodland sprite, awed by his affable father and concerned for his depressed mother. His empathy is a raw ache that seems sometimes too intense for a little heart. Even “the teeth of the comb are so gentle on his scalp,” she writes, that “it feels like crying.” He knows instinctively “that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance. This is the most magnificent thing about Arcadia.” If you’ve read Emma Donoghue’s “Room” — one of the most powerful novels of 2010 — you have some sense of the tender perspective that Groff cradles in these pages. “The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds.”
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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