6/2/2023 0 Comments Arcadia lauren groff review![]() 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. ![]() For anyone still naive enough to feel nostalgic about free-love merrymakers, T.C. 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. Stories about utopian settlements usually suffer from our dyspeptic need to humble anyone suspected of radical idealism. 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. 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. 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. ![]() 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. ![]()
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