In her very first words in Josephine Hart’s The Stillest Day, Bethesda Barnet states simply to her readers, to those who would judge her that for the first 30 years of her life she led a pious and steady life. Then one day she turned her back on piety, acting on some primeval urge that even 30 years of steadiness could not snuff out. The novel follows a path backward from this starting point. We learn that Bethesda Barnet is an art teacher in a small English town at the turn of the century who cares for her ailing mother, allows herself to be courted by a respectable man, and paints in her spare hours. She is a woman who knows the confines of her limited role in life and stays within them.
Then one day during a rain shower, Bethesda glimpses the school’s newest teacher, Mathew Pearson. That one glimpse is enough to unmoor her. Obsessed, she paints Mathew’s face upon mirrors and gazes into those mirrors so as to join her image with his. The arrival of Matthew’s pregnant wife, Mary, does not quell Bethesda’s passions; she simply hides her unhinging in more clever ways. Mary, cheerful and maternal her thoughts as transparent as Bethesda’s are hidden strikes up a friendship with Bethesda’s ailing mother. And it is during one of Mary’s visits to the Barnet household that Bethesda commits the act that will alter her life forever. It’s an act that’s essentially merciful; yet in the eyes of the town, it infringes upon the powers reserved for God. How dare Bethesda Barnet a woman take the powers of life and death into her own frail hands?
Like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Bethesda will be scorned and feared the rest of her life for her actions. Unlike Hester Prynne, though, Bethesda’s act leaves her free to be the woman she becomes, for better or for worse. Less and less a teacher and daughter, Bethesda becomes fully a painter, her canvasses evolving from still lifes of church and town to the surreal. In her love for Mathew, she grows fierce and hard. In short, Bethesda Barnet becomes a dangerous woman. So she is sent away to an island, where both she and the book turn haunting and strange.
The Stillest Day is a mysterious, challenging novel. On a theoretical level, it has plenty to say about women’s issues. Purely on a visceral level, it’s a moving story. Bethesda is one of the more interesting narrators to surface in a long while. As she says of herself on the book’s first page: Nothing in my past could have prepared me for what it is that I became.
Laura Wexler is a reviewer in Athens, Georgia.
In her very first words in Josephine Hart’s The Stillest Day, Bethesda Barnet states simply to her readers, to those who would judge her that for the first 30 years of her life she led a pious and steady life. Then one day she turned her back on piety, acting on some primeval urge that […]
In a talk Edwidge Danticat gave in January 1998, she commented, "It's often thought that poor people have no interior lives, and later, I always tell people to fill in the silence that bothers them." Thus, it's fitting that Danticat's newest novel, The Farming of Bones, set in 1937 during a bloody border uprising between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, begins inside the dreams of Amabelle Desir, and returns there many times.
The dream sequences are not stylistic accoutrements—they are Amabelle's remembrances of her mother and father's drowning in the river that makes up the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. For Amabelle, dreams are stories a person can create and hold onto in a time when they can create and hold onto nothing else. "You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells," she says. That is why she continues to dream despite her grief and loss—her parents' death is the only story that is completely hers, and she wants to remember it.
Soon, however, Amabelle gathers even more losses. In a moment, or an evening at least, the cane-growing community where she has lived and worked since a Dominican family rescued her from the riverbank, transforms. Suddenly, armed Dominican soldiers are forcing the Haitian caneworkers onto trucks, along with Amabelle's lover and soon-to-be husband. She knows it is likely that he has been killed, but on the slim hope that he was taken to the border, she begins a journey through the woods and mountains to find him. Along the way she and her traveling partner are attacked, their mouths stuffed with parsley—for something as slight as a person's pronunciation of the Spanish word for parsley is enough to divide native from alien, European from African, insider from outsider. Such divisions are at the heart of the book.
The Farming of Bones is profoundly sad and beautiful. More than anything, it's an exploration of grief, of how loss can become the defining motif of people's lives. It is an investigation of the idea of borders, of how a particular river can divide one country from another, and the living from the dead. Amabelle is kin to that dividing river. She exists as the river does, in a half-life between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, between life and death. And Danticat tells us something history should have already taught us: at borders, there are only stories of loss.
Laura Wexler is a freelance writer in Athens, Georgia.
In a talk Edwidge Danticat gave in January 1998, she commented, "It's often thought that poor people have no interior lives, and later, I always tell people to fill in the silence that bothers them." Thus, it's fitting that Danticat's newest novel, The Farming of Bones, set in 1937 during a bloody border uprising between […]
Erasmus Darwin Wells has a history of failure. At 40, he has no wife, no children, no close friends, and his life's work as a scholar-naturalist has come to almost nothing. Yet, as Andrea Barrett's fascinating new adventure novel demonstrates, it's never too late for a second chance.
Set in the mid-19th-century, The Voyage of the Narwhal follows Wells and the crew as they set sail for the Arctic, hoping to find the missing explorer Sir John Franklin and perhaps get a glimpse of an open polar sea. As she did in the National Book Award-winning Ship Fever, Barrett weaves fact and fiction seamlessly, incorporating historical figures such as Sir Franklin, Thoreau, and Darwin into the lives of her fictional characters. The voyage starts off well, and an early encounter with a tribe of Greenland Esquimaux suggests that Franklin and his men had, in fact, traveled the same path. Driven on by the obsessive ambition of their commander, Zeke, however, the crew soon find themselves trapped in the ice, forced to endure an impossibly long, cruel winter off the coast of Greenland. The true nature of each man begins to emerge as they struggle to survive.
For Wells, it is a life-changing experience. In this unlikely setting, the cautious and fearful scientist, who had wrapped himself in a cloud to avoid the pain of early disappointments, reawakens to the world. He finds his first true friend in a fellow naturalist on the crew, and remarks in his journal that "they talk about what we've seen how nature, in this place and season, is reduced to her bones . . . It is so, so beautiful here, despite the danger, despite the discomfort; I would never have chosen to winter here yet it's as if I was waiting my whole life to see this." Indeed, Barrett's extraordinarily detailed and poetic descriptions bring to life the stark and radiant landscape of the Arctic and its romantic appeal for 19th-century explorers. Her exhaustive knowledge of boats and seafaring will also delight maritime fiction fans.
The turning point of the story arrives when Zeke, who has set out alone for one last expedition, fails to return. Summer is nearly over and the crew cannot survive another winter on the Narwhal. Wells must decide what to do. The consequences of his decision to leave Zeke who is also his sister's fiancee drive the rest of the story. He returns to Philadelphia maimed, guilt-ridden, and disconsolate. Yet, with the help of his family and a young friend of his sister's, he slowly recovers, finding, at last, the courage to change his life. During his winter in the Arctic, Wells mulls Thoreau's observation that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals . . . than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's own being. With this remarkable novel, Barrett proves the truth in Thoreau's words.
Beth Duris is a writer for The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.
Erasmus Darwin Wells has a history of failure. At 40, he has no wife, no children, no close friends, and his life's work as a scholar-naturalist has come to almost nothing. Yet, as Andrea Barrett's fascinating new adventure novel demonstrates, it's never too late for a second chance. Set in the mid-19th-century, The Voyage of […]
Like Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks's best-selling epic of love and war, Charlotte Gray plunges the reader into the darkest, most harrowing days of war.
This time, the setting is blacked-out London and unoccupied France during World War II. Faulks' complicated heroine, Charlotte Gray, is a young Scottish woman haunted by a troubled childhood. Wanting to help the Allied war effort, she moves to London and falls passionately in love with a dashing RAF pilot named Peter Gregory. Soon afterwards, his plane mysteriously disappears over France.
Determined to find Peter, Charlotte uses her connections to join British Intelligence and work undercover for the fledging French Resistance. Disguised as a French woman, she is dropped by parachute into the French countryside. Here, just beneath the surface of everyday life, horrors occur. Through a web of war-damaged people, Faulks creates a vivid, unforgettable portrait of Vichy France under the occupation.
The best and worst of human nature is laid bare, and Charlotte finds herself "drawn into the frightening destiny of the people she had met." Not knowing if Peter is alive or dead, Charlotte decides to stay in France. Even as the danger mounts, she is befriended and protected by Julian, a passionate member of the local Resistance. Julian's father, a failed artist of Jewish descent, lets Charlotte stay in his house and helps her come to terms with her past. When the Nazis finally come for Julian's father and two local Jewish children, Charlotte's agony leads her to her most dangerous and personal mission yet.
Faulks' convincing historical detail and complex characters vividly illustrate the insanity of war. Charlotte Gray, beautiful and haunting, is as memorable for its portrayal of everyday lives under the occupation as it is for its powerful wartime suspense.
Like Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks's best-selling epic of love and war, Charlotte Gray plunges the reader into the darkest, most harrowing days of war. This time, the setting is blacked-out London and unoccupied France during World War II. Faulks' complicated heroine, Charlotte Gray, is a young Scottish woman haunted by a troubled childhood. Wanting to help […]
After writing two witty novels about gay life in Washington, D.C., Louis Bayard hit on a winning formula with his 2003 novel, Mr. Timothy, which starred Dickens’ Tiny Tim and gave the character a complexity that was sorely lacking in the original. He followed that up with The Pale Blue Eye, a story of Edgar Allen Poe’s time as a cadet at West Point that earned an Edgar Award nomination. Now, Bayard turns his attention to the turbulent French Restoration. The Black Tower puts legendary French policeman and ex-con Vidocq (the inspiration for Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean) together with medical student Hector Carpentier to find out what really happened to the son of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.
A clue in a dead man’s pocket leads Vidocq to Hector, whose late father, a doctor, treated the Dauphin during his imprisonment. Though records show the boy died in the tower, a long-lost diary and a murderer who seems to be stalking Hector and anyone else with a connection to the boy-who-should-be-king indicate otherwise. Could Charles Rapskeller, a young man with an affinity for gardening, really be Prince Louis-Charles?
Bayard has a particular talent, also displayed in Mr. Timothy, for evoking the poignancy of the longing for a lost father without being overly sentimental. In the years following the Dauphin’s “death,” the senior Carpentier became closed off from his family and friends, and it is only by reading his journals that Hector discovers how much he was loved by his father. Though he and Charles are close in age, Hector finds himself taking over his father’s role as Charles’ protector, while Vidocq goads him on in pursuit of definitive evidence of Charles’ royal lineage.
In his previous novels, Bayard has had the courage to keep the ending honest—as in life, not every loose end is left neatly tied. The Black Tower is no exception, and it includes a final twist that will leave even the closest of readers flipping back through the pages to find clues they’ve overlooked. A perfectly balanced blend of compelling characters, elegant writing and spellbinding plot, The Black Tower will keep fans of historical fiction riveted.
Did you love The Pale Blue Eye on Netflix? Check out Louis Bayard's earlier novel about a real-life mystery involving the disappearance of Marie Antoinette's son.
Before reading The Known World, Edward P. Jones’ staggeringly accomplished first novel, I had no idea that there had been free black people in the antebellum South who themselves owned slaves. This strange and disturbing footnote to African-American history forms the core of a truly remarkable work of fiction by a writer who was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for his 1992 collection of short stories, Lost in the City (just reissued by Amistad Press).
Set in the 1850s, the novel begins with the death of Henry Townsend, “a black man of thirty-one years with thirty-three slaves and more than fifty acres of land that sat him high above many others, white and black, in Manchester County, Virginia.” Henry had been born a slave. His father, Augustus, bought his own freedom with money saved doing carpentry work, then freed his wife, Mildred, and finally Henry. In the intervening years, though, Henry becomes a favorite of his owner, William Robbins. By the time Henry is freed, he has absorbed Robbins’ keen business sense, and that includes the knowledge that land, and the slaves necessary to work it, are the sources of power in the agrarian South.
Robbins sells Henry a parcel of land and his first slave, Moses, who will become overseer of the Townsend place. Augustus and Mildred’s joy over having secured their son’s freedom is spoiled by the fact that he would choose to own other humans. Henry marries Caldonia, a light-skinned, free black woman, and sets about running his farm. When Henry dies, Caldonia has the moral support of Robbins and a small group of fellow free blacks, but she turns increasingly to Moses for the day-to-day running of things. Before long, the two begin a sexual liaison that blurs the line between owner and slave, and gives Moses dangerous notions about his “place.” Meanwhile, the fragile balance of the Southern caste system is teetering throughout the county. The local sheriff is John Skiffington, an anti-slavery Southerner. When he and his Philadelphia-born wife are given a young girl as a slave for a wedding present, they choose to raise her almost as a daughter. Yet despite his personal views, Skiffington has vowed to uphold the law of the land, which means hiring patrollers to round up escaped slaves. When Augustus is sold back into bondage by one of these men, Skiffington’s unfortunate destiny is sealed.
There are so many characters and sub-stories in The Known World that it is impossible here to convey adequately the elegant complexity of this tale. Even the minor characters have rich interior lives. We get a clear understanding of what motivates each of them as they navigate through this complicated world where it is not uncommon for people to own their own wives, children or other relatives. Indeed, one of the most admirable things about the novel is that every character is flawed there are good blacks and bad, just as there are good and bad whites.
Jones’ narrative style is leisurely, and the impact of his story builds slowly yet steadily, until its full meaning takes shape. While the storytelling is never overtly political, the underlying message is strong. Even in this world where people are marked by the color of their skin, it is not always clear who is enslaved and who is free. Who’s to say if Alice, a seemingly simple-minded slave who wanders the woods at night, is less free than Henry, who is saddled with the responsibilities and shame of slaveholding? Or than a white man like Skiffington, who does not have the freedom to exert his own beliefs in the circumscribed racist community? Wise reviewers tend to be cautious, but I’ll go out on a limb here and assert that The Known World is a masterwork of fiction. If the talent he displays with this new book is any indication of things to come, Edward P. Jones is poised to join the rarefied ranks of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker among contemporary black writers.
Robert Weibezahl has worked as a writer and publicist for 20 years.
Before reading The Known World, Edward P. Jones’ staggeringly accomplished first novel, I had no idea that there had been free black people in the antebellum South who themselves owned slaves. This strange and disturbing footnote to African-American history forms the core of a truly remarkable work of fiction by a writer who was a […]
Actor William DeMeritt’s deep, measured narration enhances the elegant, evocative prose of Nathan Harris’ debut novel, The Sweetness of Water (12 hours).
In the waning blood-filled days of the Civil War, Georgia farmer George Walker hires formerly enslaved brothers Landry and Prentiss to work his peanut farm—and perhaps to ease his restless soul. When George’s Confederate soldier son, Caleb, unexpectedly returns home, and Caleb’s romantic relationship with another soldier comes to light, tensions between George’s family and the town’s disapproving residents boil over. Only the cool, determined leadership of George’s wife, Isabelle, offers a path to healing.
DeMeritt’s performance of this Southern cast of characters reveals an actor in full control of his range. Particularly for the male roles, DeMeritt narrates with such skill that the listener can envision some of the characters’ faces just by the way their voices sound. Amid this world of unbridled change, DeMeritt illuminates subtle yearnings, quiet dangers and a persistent sense of hope.
William DeMeritt performs with such skill that the listener will be able to envision Nathan Harris’ character’s faces just by the way their voices sound.
As The Living and the Lost opens, Millie Mosbach has just returned to her hometown, Allied-occupied Berlin. Millie is German and Jewish, and she escaped Berlin as a teen before the war with her brother, David. She attended high school and college in the U.S. with the help of an American family friend, all the while not knowing whether her parents and younger sister survived.
Postwar Berlin is almost unrecognizable. It’s a mess of rubble and half-standing buildings, its inhabitants starving, the city divided into Allied and Soviet sections that are not yet completely sundered by the Berlin Wall. Millie has joined the U.S. Army, helping to sort out which Berliners can continue to work as editors, publishers and translators in this new denazified Germany. Meanwhile, David, who served with the Army in Europe during the war, is in Berlin, too, and he’s not telling Millie what he’s up to.
As the novel moves between Millie’s and David’s points of view, we get vivid glimpses of life in this unsettled landscape, with uncanny scenes of American military officers enjoying beers in former Nazi halls, German Fräuleins by their sides, and the abundance in military black markets contrasting with the extreme lack faced by Berliners. Millie is haunted by the probable loss of her parents and sister and by the choices she made earlier in life.
As Millie tries to tamp down her trauma, guilt and anger, the novel flashes back in time, filling in the siblings’ pasts. While she was a scholarship student at the tony Bryn Mawr College, Millie experienced both the joys of college life and a genteel but insidious antisemitism.
The Living and the Lost moves along quickly, and its descriptions and dialogue feel true to the era. While the novel would have benefited from more interiority from both Millie and David, it’s still an illuminating historical drama with plenty of action and even some romance, evoking a lesser-known historical period—the immediate postwar era and Berlin before the wall—and the complications and compromises that come with the end of war.
Ellen Feldman offers an illuminating historical drama with plenty of action and even some romance, evoking the rarely explored setting of postwar Europe.
In Jai Chakrabarti’s debut novel, A Play for the End of the World, a play by Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore is a magical and malleable symbol, used to help children accept a dark reality and as a tool for resistance.
When Holocaust survivor Jaryk Smith was a child living in a orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland, The Post Office represented the possibility of hope. In the children’s production of the play, Jaryk played Amal, a little boy with an incurable disease who’s confined indoors but makes the most of what he’s got: a window. Amal makes friends at a distance and gleans vicarious joy from watching others play.
Through the play, Jaryk and his fellow orphans experienced a kind of liberation by imagination. But while the other children’s relief was temporary, Jaryk had the life-altering fortune and burden of becoming the orphanage’s lone survivor. Unlike his fellow orphans, unlike almost everyone else he had known in his short life, Jaryk got a chance at a long life.
A Play for the End of the World primarily focuses on what happens next, how new life takes root after extreme ruin. Chakrabarti frames recovery and renewal as a long and winding road, requiring more than a little grace and serendipity. For a long time, connections are difficult for Jaryk, relationships almost impossible. He experiences the world as though he’s wrapped in thick, protective insulation. He has big feelings but they’re subdued or self-censored.
Then in 1972, Jaryk’s oldest friend, Misha, a man 10 years his senior who lived and worked at the orphanage when Jaryk was a child, dies unexpectedly while traveling alone in India for a production of The Post Office. Jaryk is tasked with taking Misha’s place as director, and the play provides him with another shot at redemption. “I finally have a chance to do something good,” he tells his weary girlfriend, Lucy Gardner.
Whereas “in Warsaw, The Post Office helped to prepare the children for death,” this production has a radically different agenda. In Gopalpur in West Bengal, where the people are poor and the territory disputed, the production’s organizer, professor Rudra Bose, sees the famous play as a political tool: “It’s all about a new life. About resistance!” But while political unrest is the novel’s frequent backdrop, its most recurring theme is stubborn resilience: living fully in the face of sorrow, loving after immeasurable loss.
Chakrabarti’s novel is realistic and tentative and breathtakingly poignant, with a payoff that’s more than worth the trip if you have the heart to withstand it.
Jai Chakrabarti’s debut novel is breathtakingly poignant, with a payoff that’s more than worth the trip if you have the heart to withstand it.
Lauren Groff’s fourth novel, her highly anticipated follow-up to Fates and Furies (2015), takes place almost 800 years ago, yet it feels both current and timely. Set in a small convent in 12th-century England, Matrix looks back in time to comment astutely on the world as we now know it, exploring big ideas about faith, gender, community and individualism.
Abbess Marie is based in part on Marie de France, France’s earliest known female poet and one of the country’s most well-regarded literary stylists. As a teenager, Groff’s fictional Marie is banished from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court and sent to molder in an impoverished abbey. Marie soon rises to the senior position of abbess, and she transforms the convent into a thriving estate.
Marie’s modifications to the abbey are guided by visions that draw imagery from the real Marie de France’s tales of courtly love. These visions are the motivation and impetus for many of Marie’s boldest innovations: the successful scriptorium where gorgeous new manuscripts are produced; the abbess house where Marie offers comfort and privacy; and the impenetrable labyrinth that girds the abbey, protecting the women who live inside.
Groff brings a bold originality to Matrix and a compassion for her characters, no matter how prickly some of them may be. This is a heartening story of one woman’s vision and creativity, unthwarted and flourishing, despite all odds.
A 12th-century abbess deserves to be your next literary hero. Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies, shares how she found refuge in her latest novel’s community of nuns.
Lauren Groff’s fourth novel, Matrix, is a mesmerizing portrait of a remarkable nun in 12th-century England who oversees an abbey in a rapidly changing and sometimes hostile environment. After Groff’s previous books, which have explored small towns, utopian communities and Floridian flora and fauna, my most pressing questions for the author can be boiled down to, why a novel about nuns? And why now?
“Those are the questions,” Groff says with a laugh, speaking by video call from a writer’s retreat in Italy. She traces the novel’s genesis back to three years ago, when she was at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, working on a very different novel, one she hopes that at some point will come into the world. “I was surrounded by artists and scholars that were doing things that were so far beyond my ken,” she recalls. “Every day was like a mini-explosion in my brain.”
She attended a lecture on medieval nuns by Dr. Katie Bugyis, who has researched the lives of nuns based on the liturgy they produced and used. “It was as if she had opened up my brain and threw her light in,” Groff says. “I knew it was the next thing I was going to write.”
“Awe is the most powerful emotion I know, because within awe, there is fear, there is love, there is wonder.”
Marie, the nun protagonist of Matrix, is banished from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court at age 17 and sent to live in a penurious abbey. Awkward and miserable, Marie makes the best of her situation and soon rises to the senior position of abbess. Bit by bit she transforms the tumbledown, muddy convent into a prosperous estate with verdant fields, healthy flocks and a successful scriptorium, protected by a forest labyrinth and Marie’s shrewd awareness of shifting political winds. Along the way, she is inspired by spiritual visions and memories of her mother’s family, whom she accompanied on the early Crusades.
Marie’s story is based on that of Marie de France, considered to be one of France’s most important writers and the country’s first acknowledged female poet. So little is known about Marie that her biography is merely outline; Groff describes trying to research her as “being handed a poetic form.”
But we do know some things about her, Groff says. “We know approximately when she lived and where. We know she was a noble or gentlewoman because she was able to write in several languages. She was educated at a time when most women were not. And most importantly, we know what she wrote: fables and lais,” or narrative poems of courtly love.
Elements from Marie’s lais appear throughout Matrix, which is rich with furled rosebuds, blooming trees and enclosed gardens. “It was a joyous experience to go back to the lais, which I knew from college, and to create her life from the work,” Groff says. “I know it’s the opposite of what scholars do, but I’m not a scholar, I’m a fiction writer.”
Groff did a tremendous amount of research for Matrix, including visiting a small Benedictine convent in Connecticut where she was struck by the strong ties of kinship and community. “I was profoundly moved by the way the older nuns, who are not far from death, are cared for by the people who love them so deeply,” she says. “It’s a definition of family that is not often represented in the outside world.”
Groff drew from this idyllic setting to create her fictional community of sisters. Marie’s convent is a place of female friendships and love affairs, scholarship and learning. It’s a refuge for outsider women and those with untapped talents, ranging from engineering to calligraphy to animal husbandry. “I wanted to live in a world of women,” Groff says. “I wanted to hear women’s voices, experience only a female gaze.”
Examining the balance of community and the individual is nothing new for Groff, whose novels The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia also examined small-town life and intentional communities. Even Fates and Furies depicts a closed community of two people whose insular marriage makes it difficult for anyone else to penetrate their intense bond.
“You know,” Groff remarks ruefully, “I keep thinking I’m writing a brand-new book, but maybe I’m writing the same thing every time. I was raised in the small town of Cooperstown, New York, and I was utterly fascinated by the way individuals acted within a tight and closed community. It was early training for storytelling to be among growing, living stories of other people that you could watch out of the corner of your eye. A small place in the middle of nowhere was a real petri dish for understanding human behavior.”
“It was such an exciting feeling, like an electrical charge, to see biblical stories echoing in literature.”
Even though the world of Matrix could not seem further away from 21st-century America, Groff is well aware of how current affairs informed the writing of her new novel—and indeed, all of her work. “It’s very much in our national DNA to insist on the importance of the individual,” she says. “But a country cannot be a country without the collective, and right now the pressure points between these two courses are rising. My work struggles with this paradox and explores how Americans are choosing to live.”
At several points in the novel, Marie experiences striking visions that she does not share with the other nuns but rather keeps in a series of private notebooks. These visions draw imagery and language from the Bible, a seminal book in Groff’s upbringing and an early step to her lifelong love of literature.
Groff was raised in the Presbyterian church, where her father was a deacon, and she remembers the church of her childhood as a vaulted, soaring space, “like the inside of a whale.” The experience of being in communion with others while singing or praying had a meaningful aesthetic impact. But it was the stories from the Bible that hooked her.
“Stories are the thing that made me a person,” she says. “I was the kind of kid who was filled with religious fervor. I had a beautiful little Bible with fine tissue pages and gilt edges. I would sit and read it at night, just trying to get through all the begats and the thous, and just be filled with this unappeasable longing for the stories. And then I started seeing the stories reflected back at me from the other things I was reading. It was such an exciting feeling, like an electrical charge, to see biblical stories echoing in literature.”
Over time, Groff explains, literature took the place of religion. “I’ve become a secular believer, if that makes sense. I believe in the goodness of humanity. I am moved by the natural world in a way that is akin to the kinds of things I experienced as a child. When I am writing, I try to give the reader a few of those moments of wonder and awe. Awe is the most powerful emotion I know, because within awe, there is fear, there is love, there is wonder.”
The awe-filled moments in Matrix are too many to count, whether in the poetry of Marie’s visions, her longing for friends who are far away or the vivid descriptions of the creation of the labyrinth, a structure associated with religious contemplation that in Groff’s hands becomes a symbol, a weapon and a line of defense.
Marie conceives of the labyrinth less as a place for the nuns to find peace and more as an instrument to separate themselves from the outside world, which she perceives as dangerous and threatening. For Groff, the symbol of the labyrinth goes even deeper. She read about ancient ruins in England that had been buried underground over centuries and were now re-emerging. “Because of climate change and the wet ground drying out, the impressions of these ruins are literally coming up from the earth and becoming apparent,” she says. “I loved that idea of a hidden structure that only through trauma could be revealed. The novel is structured around the shape of a labyrinth, although it’s deeply embedded and I’m not sure anyone can see it. But it’s there.”
Matrix tells a tale of the astounding ingenuity, strength and female companionship that flourished during an era of intense patriarchal oppression. Matrix is the Latin word for mother, but additional definitions include a plant whose seeds were used for producing other plants, a grid, an organizational structure and, perhaps most significantly, “the bedrock in geology in which you find gems.”
Groff has created a labyrinth of jewel-like moments, selected from an incredible woman’s life during a time ostensibly far away from our own, and transformed it into a novel that is perfect for right now.
Author photo by Eli Sinkus
Matrix author Lauren Groff shares how she found refuge in her latest novel’s community of nuns. “It’s a definition of family that is not often represented in the outside world.”
Nowadays, it’s easy to find out where you came from. Just pluck out some hair follicles or scrape your cheek for some cells, send them to a lab far away, and they’ll determine your genetic makeup. Even when science reveals these secrets about our bodies, however, ancestry and heritage are still complex elements of our personal identities. In her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, celebrated poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers weaves an epic ancestral story, showing that where any one person comes from is much more complicated than charts and graphs.
Ailey Pearl Garfield, a young Black girl with a big family, takes center stage, and the history and intricacies of her ancestry drive the novel’s plot. We jump, sometimes dizzyingly, across space and time to trace her family line, and the result is a dazzling tale of love and loss. The story begins with a formerly enslaved man and his acceptance into a Native tribe, the first fateful moment of a vast history. Centuries later, Ailey is visited in her dreams by a “long-haired lady” who helps her to uncover their shared story.
From slavery to freedom, discrimination to justice, tradition to unorthodoxy, this story covers large parts of not just of Ailey’s heritage but also America’s. It’s the kind of familial epic that many Americans, particularly African Americans, can relate to, as Jeffers limns this family’s story with the trauma, faults and passions that we all harbor. Her masterful treatment of the characters and their relationships, paired with the thorough and engaging way the narrative is laid out, makes for a book that is easy to invest and get lost in—a feat for such a long, intricate work. Best yet, the novel incorporates the words of W.E.B. Du Bois throughout its 800-plus pages; those words are the story’s spine, its beating heart, its very life force.
Comparisons to Toni Morrison are bound to be made and will be apt in most cases, as this novel feels as important as many of Morrison’s. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois earns its place among such company, as Jeffers engages with and builds upon the legacy of African American literature as carefully and masterfully as she does the narrative of Ailey’s family.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers weaves an epic ancestral story, showing that where any one person comes from is much more complicated than genetic makeup.
In Kaia Alderson’s witty and powerful debut novel, World War II is a conflict not only between nations but also within the hearts of two Black women serving in the U.S. Army. It’s also a chance to prove themselves to their restrictive families and a prejudiced society. Sisters in Arms chronicles their story, which spans the constraints of New York City and the perils of war-torn Europe.
For Grace Steele, pursuing a career in classical music is all she has ever wanted. But when her music idol questions her commitment, she enlists in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), which she hopes will provide her with the sense of fulfillment she longs for. She enrolls alongside Eliza Jones, a lively and privileged Black woman who is defying her father to demonstrate her capacity to thrive on her own. Grace and Eliza join the women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, pioneers in a field dominated by white men.
Sisters in Arms stands out for its originality in exploring a lesser-known part of World War II and American history. The novel also incorporates the inspiring contributions of real Black historical figures including American educator Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, Major Charity Adams (the first Black woman to be an officer of the WAAC) and Truman Gibson Jr. (a civilian aide), as well as Mary Bankston, Mary Barlow and Delores Browne, Black female soldiers who died while fighting in France.
The novel is not only a historical account of the war but also a beautifully interlacing tale of loss, friendship and romance. Despite Grace’s irritable attitude and Eliza’s sense of self-importance, the two strike up a friendship. During their service, their bond is tested, but they learn to stick together to survive, and their romantic relationships enhance their personal stories.
Both women grow during their time in the Army. From a lost and unsure woman whose future is determined by her mother, Grace develops her own perspective on what she wants to accomplish. Eliza proves that even when she is stripped of her privilege, she is capable of succeeding. They encounter and triumph against racism, chauvinism and the turbulent events of the war.
An outstanding historical novel, Sisters in Arms succeeds at celebrating the accomplishments of the Six Triple Eight Battalion through the lives of two audacious Black women.
In Kaia Alderson’s witty and powerful debut novel, World War II is a conflict not only between nations but also within the hearts of two Black women.
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
Groff was raised in the Presbyterian church, where her father was a deacon, and she remembers the church of her childhood as a vaulted, soaring space, “like the inside of a whale.” The experience of being in communion with others while singing or praying had a meaningful aesthetic impact. But it was the stories from the Bible that hooked her.
