Discussion leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman
In the 1970's, a group of idealists set out to live off the land. They find themselves living in a decrepit mansion called Arcadia House and the land surrounding it. Handy, a musician and the group's leader; Astrid, a midwife; Abe, a master carpenter; Hannah, a baker and historian; and Abe and Hannah's only child Bit, who is born soon after the commune is created are the main characters in the book. While Arcadia rises and falls, Bit, too, ages and changes. Can he remain connected to the peaceful homestead life of Arcadia and its inhabitants and yet become his own man, venturing out into the world he must learn to live in?
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- BookList:
- /* 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 (Reviewed 01-01-2012) (Booklist, vol 108, number 9, p35)
- Publishers Weekly:
- /* Starred 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.) --Staff (Reviewed November 21, 2011) (Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 47, p)
- Library Journal:
- /* Starred 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 --Beth E. Andersen (Reviewed December 1, 2011) (Library Journal, vol 136, issue 20, p114)
- Kirkus:
- /* Starred Review */ An astonishing novel, both in ambition and achievement, filled with revelations that appear inevitable in retrospect, amid the cycle of life and death. As a follow-up to Groff's well-received debut (The Monsters of Templeton, 2008), this novel is a structural conundrum, ending in a very different place than it begins while returning full circle. At the outset, it appears to be a novel of the Utopian, communal 1960s, of a charismatic leader, possibly a charlatan, and an Arcadia that grows according to his belief that "the Universe will provide." It concludes a half-century later in a futuristic apocalypse of worldwide plague and quarantine. To reveal too much of what transpires in between would undermine the reader's rich experience of discovery: "The page of a book can stay cohesive in the eyes: one sentence can lead to the next. He can crack a paragraph and eat it. Now a story. Now a novel, one full life enclosed in covers." The "he" is Bit Stone, introduced as a 5-year-old child of that commune, and it is his life that is enclosed in these covers. Following a brief prologue, representing a pre-natal memory, the novel comprises four parts, with leaps of a decade or more between them, leaving memory and conjecture to fill in the blanks. At an exhibition of Bit's photography, a passion since his childhood (documented in some shots), those who had known him all his life realized, "What they found most moving, they told him later, were the blanks between the frames, the leaps that happened invisibly between the then and the now." The cumulative impact of this novel is similar, as the boy leaps from the commune and subsequently his parents, becomes a parent himself, deals with the decline of his parents and finds his perspective both constant and constantly changing: "He can't understand what the once-upon-a-time Bit is saying to the current version of himself or to the one who will stand here in the future...worn a little more by time and loss." A novel of "the invisible tissue of civilization," of "community or freedom," and of the precious fragility of lives in the balance.(Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2012)
Biography of Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia
Lauren Groff was born in 1978 in
Cooperstown, N.Y. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her short stories have appeared in a
number of journals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic
Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Subtropics,
and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories 2007 and Best
American Short Stories 2010, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best
New American Voices 2008. A story will be included in the 2012 edition
of PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories.
She was awarded the Axton Fellowship
in Fiction at the University of Louisville, and has had residencies and
fellowships at Yaddo, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center
and Ragdale.
Lauren's first novel, The
Monsters of Templeton, published in February 2008, was a New York Times
Editors’ Choice selection and bestseller and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize
for New Writers. Her second book, Delicate Edible Birds, is a
collection of stories. Her second novel, Arcadia, was published in March
2012.
She lives in Gainesville, Florida
with her husband and two sons.
Further Reading:
