40 The New York ReviewIndustrious Habits
Irina DumitrescuMatrix
by Lauren Groff.
Riverhead, 260 pp., $28.00It is hard to pin down Marie de France,
though many have tried. The best-
known woman poet of the Middle Ages
is a chimera, pieced together centuries
after she lived from stray clues in the
poems that are attributed to her. In the
story most often told about her today,
Marie was a learned French émigré
connected to the court of Henry II
and Eleanor of Aquitaine in late-
twelfth-century England. She wrote a
collection of animal fables, translated
a religious treatise on Purgatory and
a life of Saint Audrey from the Latin,
and composed a series of twelve short
tales in verse, called lais, about pas-
sionate love.
We do not know if a single per-
son wrote all the works ascribed to
“Marie,” or if this was a pen name ad-
opted by multiple authors. (The pro-
logue to one lai names “Marie” in the
third person, and the epilogue to the
fables is in Marie’s voice, adding that
she is from France.) Scholars have en-
deavored, without success, to identify
her with a crew of contemporary ab-
besses and noblewomen.
Despite her shadowy history, Marie
remains a singular, appealing figure. It
is unusual to find signed vernacular po-
etry from this period. A female author
is even rarer. Above all, the myth of
Marie endures because of her lais. They
are set in a long-gone, enchanted Celtic
world in which people transform into
animals, unmanned boats bring lovers
to each other, and fairies sweep knights
to Avalon. Haunting, erotic, and mel-
ancholic, these tales in verse show howbrilliant and destructive love can be.
Whoever wrote these poems wanted to
craft a beauty almost painful to behold.
It is this enigmatic artist whom Lau-
ren Groff has made the protagonist of
her new novel. Matrix (a word that in
Latin can mean “mother,” “womb,”
and “female breeding animal,” which
will turn out to be relevant) begins
with seventeen-year-old Marie’s arrival
at a poor, plague-infested abbey in
England and follows her career as she
takes control of the community, sets its
accounts in order, puts the other nuns
to work, and embarks on an ambitious
building program justified by a series
of convenient divine revelations. The
lais are a mere diversion in this story.
Marie writes them in an attempt to
curry favor with Eleanor of Aquitaine,
but they fail in their purpose and are
rarely mentioned again in the book.
Whatever talent Groff’s Marie has, it
lies in networking, team management,
and establishing plans for sustained
growth and capital acquisition.
Groff has created a heroine who is
more or less the opposite of the little
we know of Marie de France. To be
fair, Groff is not writing a strict his-
torical novel but a work of imagina-
tion, based on real medieval people
and events. Still, it’s worth asking why
she would choose Marie de France
only to reject what makes that wom-
an’s poems so remarkable. In Matrix,
beauty is suspect, art and writing are
powerless, sex is without passion, and
strategy stands in for enchantment.
The true ideal of this novel is work:
vigorous, ruddy-cheeked, sweat-of-the-
brow physical labor presented with the
cheerfulness of a midcentury Commu-
nist propaganda poster.This is not to say that Matrix is not
beautifully written. Groff can write a
sentence with the spiky surprise of a
good lyric poem, and while her own
love of language has sometimes run
away with her (as in her 2015 novel,
Fates and Furies), here she deploys it
with control. Groff’s prose in Matrix is
resonant in its simplicity, particularly
suited to her evocation of the hum-
ble lives of nuns whose community is
“not a tapestry of individual threads
but a solid sheet like pounded gold.”
Nevertheless, her challenges in telling
this story are evident. How can a fe-
male protagonist in a historical setting
seem engaging without being made to
conform to today’s progressive stan-
dards? How can a writer who funda-
mentally mistrusts human ambition
and progress celebrate a strong, enter-
prising female character? And, finally,
the question that has haunted Groff’s
work for years: What kind of utopias
can we imagine when the apocalypse is
already in sight?Medieval motifs have appeared in
Groff’s work before, lending a mythic
aspect to her characters. Fates and
Furies tells the story of the marriage
between an epic hero and a saint, to
show how little either lives up to their
ideal type. Lotto, a tall, good-looking,
wealthy playwright named after Lance-
lot—his father was called Gawain, lest
we miss the point—is shoved toward
success by Mathilde, whose immaculate
self-sacrifice hides calculated ambition
of ter r if ying propor tions. L otto is naive
and a little too in love with glory; at one
point he writes a play about Eleanor of
Aquitaine, “a genius, the mother ofmodern poetry.” Mathilde, bruised and
cruel, is a woman one can both hate
and admire, and thus enormous fun to
watch in action.
Matrix feels at times like the novel
Lotto and Mathilde might write. Marie
is sent from France to be prioress of a
“grayish whitish abbey” so devoid of
life even its nuns seem to her like “car-
rionbirds descending in slow circles to
their feast of death below.” It quickly
becomes clear that her spirit is too great
to be confined in such a narrow place.
Descended from the fairy Mélusine,
Marie was raised by a mother and aunts
who are bold Amazons, “flying across
the countryside scandalously galloping
astride, with their swordfighting and
daggerwork tutors and their knowledge
of eight dialects.” As a small child she
accompanied her family on crusade
(a rare but not inconceivable exploit)
and became obsessed with Eleanor in
the distant, idealized way practiced by
courtly lovers. This high-born novice
nun has little time for Christian teach-
ing: “Why should she, who felt her
greatness hot in her blood, be consid-
ered lesser because the first woman was
molded from a rib and ate a fruit and
thus lost lazy Eden?” Keep this small
word, “lazy,” in mind.
Groff’s larger-than-life characters
are usually tall, and much is made of
Marie’s “gauche bigboned body” and
unattractive face, as though a woman
had to escape the confines of beauty
and femininity to be capable of heroic
action. Despite Marie’s royal blood, her
looks make her unmarriageable, and
she is forced to channel her charisma
and Nietzschean force of will into mo-
nastic administration. Groff, who has
done her homework, knows that me-
dieval noblewomen were capable of
exercising power within marriage: the
book features a cameo appearance by
Empress Matilda, who fought and lost
a war for the English throne alongside
her husband. But Groff makes Marie
into a particular kind of hero: a solitary
savior arriving to build a utopia against
all odds. She needs to be on her own.
Marie’s consolidation of her power
is one of the most gripping movements
in the novel. The convent to which she
has been consigned is poor and cor-
rupt, led by an elderly abbess incapa-
ble of enforcing discipline among the
nuns or gathering the rent due from
those who live richly on its lands. The
tide changes when Marie picks one
stubborn household to serve as an ex-
ample. She rides her horse into its hall
in the early morning, sets about beating
the still-sleeping tenants with a crosier
until they abandon their home, then
settles a loyal family in their place. It
is a scene to please Machiavelli, and
the other renters duly “reach into their
pockets and pay the abbey’s portion,
some grumbling but most half proud to
have a woman so tough and bold and
warlike and royal to answer to now.”
If there is a conflict in Matrix, it lies
in Marie’s struggle to fit her desire for
fame into the unglamorous, ordinary
tasks the monastery requires of her,
first as prioress, then as abbess. “The
daily kills her greatness,” she reflects at
one point, which might be the lament of
anyone who has had to give up a dream
for a desk job. But there is a drama toThe miracle of Saint Clare; fresco from the Church of Saint Clare, Nola, Italy, thirteenth centuryA. Dagl
i Orti/NPL–DeA Picture Library/Bridgeman ImagesDumitrescu 40 45 .indd 40 11 / 16 / 21 5 : 46 PM