Review by New York Times Review
LAUREN GROFF'S second novel, "Arcadia," arrives bearing enthusiastic blurbs from Kate Walbert and Richard Russo (who claims "it's not possible to write any better without showing off"). But readers doomed to miss their subway stops will wish the cover also included a warning: "This novel will swallow you whole." "Arcadia" centers on Bit Stone, the kindhearted only child of Hannah and Abe Stone, two of the finest freaky parents in recent literary memory, who raise him in the western New York commune they helped found in the 1970s. In Arcadia, they intended to establish a home "outside the evil of commerce" and "a beacon to light up the world." This experiment lasts until Bit is 14. The novel then abruptly leaps to post-9/11 New York City, where the Stones fled when Arcadia failed them. By now Bit is a grown man with a child of his own and a job teaching "the lost art of the darkroom" in the photography department at a local university. Having "barely survived" his transition from the commune all those years ago, he's now fully adjusted to city life - although he still feels professionally numb and emotionally crippled. Then Groff skips again, to the year 2018 or so. Global warming has ravaged the planet, and a deadly pandemic is wiping out the "newborns and the old and the sick." But when an emergency calls Bit back to Arcadia, it offers him an unexpected chance to heal. Groff connects the novel's utopian past to its dystopian future through Bit's cleareyed optimism: the sensitive boy who believes "people are good and want to be good" becomes the bruised man who still finds "the possibility of beauty" in life. The book's real treat, though, is Groff's writing. As in her first novel, "The Monsters of Templeton," Groff's sentences are lush and visual. Here she is on the opening page, for instance, describing laundry day at the commune: "The women washed clothes and linens in the frigid river, beating wet fabric against the rocks. In the last light, shadows grew from their knees and the current sparked with suds." Her descriptions of the young Bit, meanwhile, uncannily illuminate the hidden world of children. One winter morning, he rises early and eats an icicle. "All day," Groff writes, "the secret icicle sits inside him, his own thing, a blade of cold, and it makes Bit feel brave to think of it." Groff also brilliantly captures the rise and fall of Arcadia. Early on, she describes the rundown mansion on the property, awaiting its renovation: "In the wind, the tarps over the rotted roof suck against the beams and blow out, a beast's panting belly." Years later, as the residents begin to depart, "Arcadia feels like a book with the pages ripped out, the cover loose in Bit's hands." One morning, Bit's father holds a tutorial on Milton for some of Arcadia's young boys. "The mind is its own place," he tells them, "and in itself can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." Bit's ability to survive his dizzying fall from the mock Eden of his youth into our broken world is a testament to that idea. "Arcadia" reminds us that "when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves." John Wilwol's reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 8, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This beautifully crafted novel follows Bit Stone, the first child to be born in the late 1960s on an upstate New York commune called Arcadia, from childhood through the year 2018. An introspective youngster who can often go months without speaking, Bit watches life from a distance. He can see how hard his parents work to make Arcadia successful, but he can also see that the self-indulgent commune leader frequently fails to live up to his own ideals. As the backbreaking work, continual poverty, and near-constant hunger work to undermine the once-flourishing sense of community, Bit's family leaves the commune to make their way in the outside world. Bit becomes a photographer and teacher but is always anchored to the place of his childhood, even marrying the emotionally damaged daughter of Arcadia's guru, but happiness proves elusive, both for him and for the greater world, as a flu pandemic sweeps the globe. Groff's second novel, after the well-received The Monsters of Templeton (2008), gives full rein to her formidable descriptive powers, as she summons both the beauty of striving for perfection and the inevitable devastation of failing so miserably to achieve it.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Groff's dark, lyrical examination of life on a commune follows Bit, aka Little Bit, aka Ridley Sorrel Stone, born in the late '60s in a spot that will become Arcadia, a utopian community his parents help to form. Despite their idealistic goals, the family's attempts at sustainability bring hunger, cold, illness, and injury. Bit's vibrant mother retreats into herself each winter; caring for the community literally breaks his father's back. The small, sensitive child whose purposeful lack of speech is sometimes mistaken for slowness finds comfort in Grimms' fairy tales and is lost in the outside world once Arcadia's increasingly entitled spiritual leader falls from grace and the community crumbles. Split between utopia and its aftermath, the book's second half tracks the ways in which Bit, now an adult (he's 50 when this all ends, in 2018), has been shaped by Arcadia; a career in photography was the perfect choice for a man who "watches life from a good distance." Bit's painful experiences as a husband, father, and son grow more harrowing as humanity becomes increasingly imperiled. The effective juxtaposition of past and future and Groff's (Delicate Edible Birds) beautiful prose make this an unforgettable read. Agent: William Morris Endeavor. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Bit Stone was born in the early 1960s to a devoted couple living in a secluded hippie commune in western New York. He was a mostly happy boy, if quietly unnerved (his mother struggles with seasonal depression), who loves Arcadia and his parents and all the people there who lead hard, pure lives, living off the land. His parents, Hannah and Adam, are at the center of the loose Arcadia administration whose acknowledged leader, Handy, increasingly butts heads with Adam. It is no surprise that as the population of Arcadia grows and drugs become more prevalent, the community, set upon by political events that move the narrative into the near future, falls apart. Bit and the other core members go out into the real world with a wildly fluctuating level of success. -VERDICT Groff, author of 2008's magnificent The Monsters of Templeton, eschews counterculture stereotypes to bring Bit's interior and exterior worlds to life. Her exquisite writing makes the reader question whether to hurry up to read the next beautiful sentence or slow down and savor each passage. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/19/11.]-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
