by Lauren Groff
Acknowledgments
My gratitude goes to everyone who gave me shelter during the long development of Arcadia: to all at Hyperion, especially Barbara Jones, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, Claire McKean, and Ellen Archer; to Jason Arthur at William Heinemann and Stephanie Sweeney at Windmill in the UK; and to Mathilde Bach and Carine Chichereau at Editions Plon in France. To my dashing agent, Bill Clegg, for his honesty, patience, and kindness, and to his assistant, Shaun Dolan. To Erika Rix, who gave me her hours. To those who provided physical space for writing: the Groffs, the Kallmans, the Drummonds, the Peddies, the Herndons, the McKune-Parrishes, and Hannah Judy Gretz and Ragdale for the lovely fellowship. To the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MFA program in creative writing at Queens University–Charlotte. To my readers: Sarah Groff, Steph Bedford, Kevin A. González, Jaime Muehl, Ashley Warlick, James Willett, and Lucy Schaeffer. To my family, friends, and the authors of the many beloved books that made this novel richer: you are too numerous to list, but I thank you.
Above all, I am grateful for my household of boys: Clay, my bedrock, and my two sons. This book is for Beck, who taught me how great-hearted little boys can be.
Reading Group Guide
Introduction
The background for Lauren Groff’s sweeping second novel is Arcadia, a utopian commune in upstate New York. Formed in the 1960s by a small enclave sleeping in old buses and lean-tos far from the political turbulence of the era, it evolves and expands over time until its ideals and integrity are challenged by great swells in population, emergent personal desires and agendas, and, eventually, a new generation of Free People.
At the center of all this is Bit, whom we follow from his birth as the Littlest Bit of a Hippie, barely three pounds resting in the local market’s produce scale, through his adolescence in Arcadia, to well into his adulthood, when he struggles with the disappearance of his wife, the complex and slow death of his mother, and his responsibilities as the single father of a teenage daughter, Grete. He also must wrestle with the issue of whether to make a more modern life in the city—teaching photography, making art, and maintaining for his daughter the contemporary life she desires—or to return to the simple, protected land and lifestyle of his youth in the face of a pandemic.
Arcadia introduces us to all kinds of odd and interesting people and provides an emotional exploration of the ever-human challenges of family, personal identity, social organization, and our relationship to the natural world. In its beautiful and quiet way, it stirs us to ask weighty questions about the best way to live, about our relationships with others, about the arc of life. It also constantly reminds us of our potential as human beings for strength, wonder, and grace.
Discussion Questions
1. Thinking of Arcadia at its best moments, which of its values and tenets seem healthy and important for an individual? For a social group?
2. What are the potential threats—from within the organization and without—to such a communal social structure? How might these be guarded against or managed?
3. What’s healthy or not for children being raised in an environment such as Arcadia? Consider the different ways Bit and Helle think about their upbringing.
4. As a young man, Bit quotes George Eliot’s statement “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is . . . we are part of the divine power against evil.” Where can you find examples of this being put into action in the novel? What might this mean for your own life?
5. Why is private property not allowed in Arcadia? What effect do you think this has on the identities of those living or raised there? How much of your identity comes from things you’ve purchased? What elements of your identity are independent of what you own?
6. Midway through the story, there is a confrontation between Handy, Arcadia’s founder, and Abe, one of its leaders. How are these two men different? In what ways are they successful or failed leaders? To what extent does someone’s personal or private life affect his or her ability to lead?
7. Consider the long span of Hannah’s life. What have been her strengths and weaknesses as a member of Arcadia? As a wife? Does her admission to Abe that he always gets what he wants, for example, suggest strength or dependency?
8. What has Hannah been like as a mother to Bit? What healthy and positive effects has she had on his growth and development? What qualities does he possess as a man or a father that we can attribute to Hannah? Late in the novel, Bit confronts his mother about the profound difficulties her depression caused him as a boy. What were the long-term effects of this on the kind of person Bit becomes?
9. Consider the various uses of pharmaceuticals and other drugs in the novel: the Trippies’ permanent damage due to LSD; marijuana as recreation or economic crop; the medication that Hannah is on most of her adult life to adjust the “brain chemistry” that causes her depression. How do we determine which are healthy and which are not? What do you make of Abe’s statement that growing marijuana to raise money is “not legal” but not necessarily wrong either?
10. One of Bit’s responses to his mother’s deep depression is to decide he needs a Quest. How does that idea serve him? Real or imagined, how might a Quest be psychologically important or effective as a response to emotional difficulty?
11. Verda plays a significant role in Bit’s life, first as the seeming focus of his Quest, as the old, magical witch in the woods who might give the “curse or antidote” to help his mother. Soon, though, she becomes someone Bit visits and needs in a more realistic way. What does she offer him that is so valuable? In what ways is she different from many of the women in the novel?
12. Consider the complex character that is Helle: her precocious behavior when young; the confrontation with Handy, her father; her disturbing sexual encounter in the woods; her vague, apologetic explanation to Bit, “I thought you knew who I was”; and her return and relationship much later with Bit, the birth of Grete, and her eventual disappearance. What do you understand about her nature and behavior?
13. On the final page of the novel, we’re told that Bit “has always loved the voices of women.” Consider the various women who gather to help when Hannah falls ill: Astrid; Luisa, the nurse; Dr. Ellis Keefe. What valuable qualities does each of these women possess? In what ways are they different?
14. What effect does Groff’s decision to include the SARI pandemic have on the story?
15. Bit challenges his students to take what he calls a “digital fast,” going without any electronic communication technology (cell phone, computers, GPS, etc.) for as long as possible. Try it. Go for twelve hours. Keep track and write down the various responses and realizations you have. Afterward, assess the benefits and dangers and what you think a healthy relationship with such technologies might be.
16. At one point, Bit recalls how, as a boy, he made lists of beautiful things, a “litany” he would whisper to his mother to try to stir her out of depressive sleep. As an adult, in the midst of his troubles with his mother and wife, he does so again, this time for himself. Read his, and then try to make your own. Be specific to your personal experience. Then consider how such a gesture affects you and what role it might play in our everyday lives.
A Conversation with Lauren Groff
The tone and setting of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia are both so different, but family seems to be a pervasive theme in both books. Can you tell us a little bit about your inspiration for Arcadia?
Family is definitely a pervasive theme in both books. I was in my twenties when I wrote The Monsters of Templeton and hadn’t yet started a family of my own, so my concern was with a larger idea of family as a historical construct and as a form of legitimacy. This time around, I began this book when I was pregnant with my first son, and I was uncomfortable, at the very core of my being, with the ethical implications of bringing a child into a world that is already overburdened and uncertain. I always turn to research as a solace, and I fell in love with the wild-eyed idealists, people
who wrote utopian tracts and people who actively formed intentional communities, the ones who decided that they must do something to change their world.
The end of Arcadia almost seems dystopian, with a look into a future that is not entirely rosy. What led you to take the story in that direction, with a look into the past that you could easily imagine, and a look into the future that no one can be sure of?
The utopian and the dystopian are points on the same continuum: both are deeply concerned with how the present is tipping into the future. Both are invested with enormous amounts of anxiety, except that utopian anxiety focuses on active amelioration, and dystopian anxiety seems to sour into fear. In my research, I saw many 1960s counterculture idealists become, over time, obsessed with things like Peak Oil and gold and how to live off-grid, a kind of palpable belief that society is at the brink of failure. They’re not wrong. It’s hard to raise a child these days and not fear doom. This book was my argument with myself for hope.
How easy—or difficult—was it to inhabit the mind of Bit as a young boy, and later as a man?
All I had to do for Bit as a child was to think of my own son and imagine how he’d react to the world he was in. I was lucky in that the scope of my book was so broad: if you know a child’s foundational experiences, you know the man he’ll become.
Were any of the characters in the book drawn from anyone that you know?
Bit comes from my little boy, Beckett. My children hadn’t been born when I started the book, so Bit began as a projection of what Beckett could be and slowly aligned with my actual son as they both grew. My husband lent his personality to Abe, and when I was little, my father fell off the roof of our garage, narrowly missing paralysis, so Abe’s injury is the nightmare inverse of my father’s. Astrid’s fierceness and Hannah’s sadness are my own.
What is your next project?
My stories are soft green things that can’t be shared before they’ve had time to become tough and resilient. If I talk about them too early, they’ll die. My husband is the only person on earth who has any idea what I’m working on, but that’s because I talk in my sleep.
About the Author
Lauren Groff is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Monsters of Templeton and the critically acclaimed short story collection Delicate Edible Birds. She has won Pushcart and PEN/O. Henry prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. Her stories have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, One Story, and Ploughshares, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2007 and 2010, and Best New American Voices 2008. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and two sons.
www.laurengroff.com
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 Lauren Groff
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the original print edition of this book as follows:
Groff, Lauren.
Arcadia / Lauren Groff.—1st ed.
p.cm.
ISBN 978-1-4013-4087-2
1. Communal living—Fiction. 2. Hippies—Fiction.
3. Nineteen sixties—Fiction. 4. Coming of age—Fiction.
5. Homecoming—Fiction. 6. New York (State)—Fiction.
7. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.R6344A73 2012
813’.6—dc22 2011009956
eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-4278-4
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Cover design by Will Staehle
Author photograph by Sarah McKune
First eBook Edition
Original hardcover edition printed in the United States of America.
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