44 The New York Reviewthroughout the Christian lands will
be blamed.” Even her sole intolerance
strikes a modern note: when Eleanor
suggests that the abbey has become
too luxurious, Marie insists that “they
do eat well and plentifully, though of
course none of the nuns are fat.”There is a scene in Fates and Furies
in which Lotto describes his impossibly
perfect wife:Mathilde. She’s a saint. One of the
purest people I’ve ever met. Just
morally upright, never lies, can’t
bear a fool.... She thinks it’s unfair
that other people clean up your dirt,
so she cleans our house even though
we can afford a housekeeper.His friend sees right through him: “But
it’s exhausting to live with a saint.”
Reading about Marie’s first triumph
against the patriarchy is thrilling. As
the second and third and fourth roll by,
one longs, in the churlish way readers
do, for some catastrophe to ruffle her
composure. We see Marie adapting
her greatness to the abbey, but never
her struggling to become great in the
first place. There are promising sub-
plots along the way—small-scale at-
tempts at opposition from the men of
the nearby village, novice nuns with
disturbing ambitions—but Marie han-
dles all of them adroitly before the
tension can build to something inter-
esting. At times one of Marie’s minor
flaws threatens to become her undoing:
her repressed erotic passion, perhaps,
or her nearly narcissistic conviction
that all her undertakings are just andordained by God. But she controls her
longings with iron discipline, and the
powerful men who could oppose her
inexplicably fade away. The result is
not so much a novel as a hagiography,
beginning with signs of extraordinary
ability in childhood and proceeding,
year by year, until the splendid woman
comes to her blessed death.
To understand how strange Groff’s
choice is here, it may be worth compar-
ing Matrix to its predecessors. The no-
vel’s premise recalls Sylvia Townsend
Warner’s 1948 novel, The Corner That
Held Them, a portrait of a poor Bene-
dictine convent’s struggles to stay afloat
during the Black Death, complete with
foolish nuns, recalcitrant tenants, and a
host of accidents and diseases. Warner
has her nuns speak in a modern regis-
ter, often about which prioress is good at
“business” and about “how one should
manage: with bold strokes, with a pol-
icy that fitted the times.” But Warner’s
story is one of continuing struggle, occa-
sionally lightened by humor or insight,
and it offers no larger-than-life heroines.
Groff’s own novel Arcadia, pub-
lished in 2012, follows the rise and fall
of an ascetic commune in New York
State. Though woven through with rich
depictions of shared work, a life lived
close to nature, and the intimacy of a
tight community, Arcadia also shows
how dreams of perfection can die. Led
by a charismatic but unreliable founder
and strained by its own success, that
community and the relationships in it
split at the seams. The story of repeated
victories Marie enjoys in Matrix is less
challenging, and ultimately less hu-
mane, than the nuanced view of utopian
dreams Groff proposed in Arcadia.Groff’s rejection of the Aristotelian
structure of rising movement, crisis,
and denouement appears to be inten-
tional. In her 2019 book on narrative
patterns, Meander, Spiral, Explode,
Jane Alison compares the familiar plot
“that swells and tautens until climax,
then collapses” to the male orgasm. An
alternative Alison offers is the spiral,
an ancient shape she connects to witch-
craft, the rhythms of life, and women’s
cycles of reproduction. Groff (who has
blurbed Alison’s work) is thinking in
a similar vein when she dwells on the
comfort to be had in the predictable se-
quences of monastic life:Temporale, the proper of time, the
cycle of Christmas, the cycle of
Easter. Sanctorale, the proper of
the saints. The seasons with their
colors: dove gray to green to flo-
ral prismatic to gold. The Kalends
Nones Ides of the month. The days
of the week, the Sabbath. Night
and day.The repetitive story line of Matrix also
fits into this shape: each time Marie
dreams, Marie plans, and then Marie
wins with a small price to pay for her
victory. There is no dramatic resolution
or great shift in circumstance, just a
gentle petering out until she is ready to
dream again.
It might seem strange to imagine
Matrix as a series of female orgasms,
except that the novel really does hang
on Marie’s orgasms. Long after be-
coming a nun, she nourishes a love for
Eleanor that is “hard and sharp and
fixed,” leaving little space for other
attachments. But workaholic Marie
suffers from stress like anyone else,
a fact that does not escape Nest, the
woman who runs the monastery’s infir-
mary. Among Nest’s medicinal talents
is cunnilingus, which she cheerfully
offers to Marie, on a regular basis, as
“an expression of the humors, not un-
like bloodletting... nothing to do with
copulation.” These utilitarian releases
play a crucial part in Marie’s intellec-
tual development: they tend to be fol-
lowed by a divine revelation or some
deeper understanding of the material
world. They are also representative of
the strange bloodlessness of Groff’s
utopian design, which prefers its sex
without passion or vulnerability. At
one point, a wayward young nun dies in
childbirth, but Marie’s womb, or “ma-
trix,” is connected only to power. In the
paradise she builds, there is no space
for sin to get in the way of industry.Or rather, there is one sin, but it is
so closely bound up with virtue that
it is hard to untangle the two. Though
Groff idealizes small-scale, traditional
craftwork, such as baking or weaving,
she is suspicious of progress. This ten-
sion is embodied by Asta, the nun who
carries out Marie’s building projects.
A mechanical prodigy ever straining
toward the future, Asta has a dazzling
imagination that carries the seed for
humanity’s self-annihilation:What Asta could do if she were of
a warlike mind: machines of awful
death, things to flip fire and venom
over a distance, crushing machines,
machines of ardent substance
ready to explode; the strange nun
is so excited by ideas she forgets to
consider consequence.People who work in technology tend
not to fare well in Groff’s fiction: Ar-
cadia features two brothers, Leif, a
computer animator who takes over and
essentially destroys the commune that
forms the center of the novel, and Erik,
who is “fatty as a doughnut, spinach
stuck in his teeth, an engineer,” and
survives by making “boredom his life-
boat.” Asta has terrible table manners
too, but as a woman doing a man’s job,
she is given more sympathetic treat-
ment. Still, the innovations she designs
on Marie’s orders—the labyrinth, the
reservoir—are destructive in ways the
nuns can barely see. Animals flee their
dens and nests, trees that had endured
since the Romans are swallowed up by
rising waters, and the groundwork is
laid for centuries of mechanical inno-
vation and ecological catastrophe.
Having crafted a heroine who leans
in to monastic administration with
gusto, creating a collaborative feminist
utopia in which the elderly and disabled
are cared for, artists and architects are
given the opportunity to fulfill their
talents, and skillful oral sex is a stan-
dard part of the benefits package, Groff
finds her creation overshadowed by a
larger concern—the end of the world.
This motif has thrummed through her
work for years: Arcadia closed with an
impressively prescient pandemic, and
her enthralling 2018 short story collec-
tion, Florida, was, among other things,
a meditation on climate change. Marie’s
ambition makes her a proto- capitalist,
causing small-scale environmental di-
sasters beyond her understanding. Only
near the end does she realize that de-
spite her holiness, “deep within she has
coveted her own rebellious pride.”
The recognition that a woman’s desire
for power is no purer than a man’s would
be a remarkable twist in an otherwise
uninterrupted encomium, if Groff had
followed through on it. Instead, she res-
cues Marie from any responsibility for
her actions. As the novel closes, the now
elderly abbess ruminates on the lake of
fire in Revelation 19:20, understanding
in it a prediction of global warming:
“Marie suspects this fiery end would
be the stone and the soil and the wa-
ters of the earth itself, through human
folly and greed made too hot for it to be
willing to bear any more life upon its
back.” When, after her death, the mon-
astery’s new abbess burns the book in
which Marie records her divine revela-
tions, Groff’s narrator laments the loss
of “visions that might have shown a dif-
ferent path for the next millennium.”
Instead of taking part in the great, fool-
ish chain of human ambition, Marie is
an ignored prophetess who might have
saved the world from itself.
In the historical timeline, the one
we have to live in, writing by medie-
val women did survive. The entranc-
ing lais that play such a small part in
Groff’s story, and that were very likely
written by a woman, endure in five
manuscripts. The fables attributed to
the same writer survive in twenty-five
copies. Some of the fictional Marie’s
feminist visions are directly inspired
by those of a real twelfth-century ab-
bess, Hildegard of Bingen, from whom
we have a vast body of letters and trea-
tises. The past swallowed the brilliance
of many women, but not all. Difficult as
it is to face the prospect of a planet “too
hot to bear humanity,” as Marie pre-
dicts in her final epiphany, perhaps it’s
even harder to acknowledge that ours is
a world women helped create. QFrom The Wall
Street Journal:
“The Publisher
as Storyteller”:
“He takes us on a
personal journey...brimming with inside
stories from the world
of journalism, letters
and politics... There
is no doubt, eitherthat he’s an astute
man of books—
even a moral one.”
—Tunku Varadarajan
From Paul Volcker in his memoir:
Keeping At It:
“To Peter Osnos. It’s all your fault”
Go to PlatformBooksLLC.netfor links to interviews on
NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS Newshour and C-Span’s Q-A and more.Dumitrescu 40 45 .indd 44 11 / 16 / 21 5 : 46 PM