The whole novel is told in short scenes, usually just a few pages long, sometimes no more than a few sentences. It’s a form well suited to Bit’s intense sensitivity and Groff’s poetic style. I was constantly torn between wanting to gulp down this book or savor its lines. Even the most incidental details vibrate with life. A mouse “prays into its pink hands, watching Bit, it smoothes its fat haunches like a housewife in a new dress.” Walking after a rain shower, he sees “a low sweep of birch trees pale as girls in the dusk. There’s a feeling of captured movement, a slight tilting down the hill as if in a breath they will regain their human shapes and stumble back into a run.” We couldn’t possibly get any closer to experiencing a world as fertile as his.
Paradise is lost, of course — Groff is too steely for anything else — but “Arcadia” follows a complex, quietly hopeful trajectory through the valley of death. She has divided the story into four parts, each separated by several years, that go on to capture Bit as a lovelorn teen, then a young man and finally a gentle adult in a dystopic future that may await us all.
Even as the novel sinks into questions about social and bodily illness, it resists any easy cynicism in favor of a profound consideration of the American paradox. Like Fitzgerald at the end of “The Great Gatsby,” Groff ties Arcadia all the way back to those old Dutch sailors who looked upon this land as the “fresh, green breast of the new world.” After all, weird little groups with starry-eyed plans have scratched a long, mournful history on our shores. Bit isn’t naive enough to think his parents’ commune should have worked, but he suffers “grief as a low-grade fever.” He can’t shake the hopeful story that spawned him, that edenic sense of harmony. “We’re all looking for what we lost,” he says. “A tight, beautiful community, filled with people he loved like family, living closely and relying on one another, a world with music and stories and thought and joy, of earthy happiness.”
In practice, of course, that dream gets the psychedelic life kicked out of it. Groff’s miracle is to record the death of the fantasy but then show how the residue of affection can persist and, given the right soil, sprout again. “Arcadia” wends a harrowing path back to a fragile, lovely place you can believe in.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter: @RonCharles.
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