For example, Lotto imagines what the world would look like under a volcanic explosion: “As if some mad child had come along and scribbled black and gray over the landscape the streams gone greasy, the trees powder puffs of ash, greensward a slick of gleaming oil … The dead clacketing their bones.” What is missing is the reader’s empathy with the characters.

Her book is rich in similes and passages of extraordinary imagery. Groff’s complex novel is beautifully written.

There is no deus ex machina here, unless it is the tying together of the many strands suggested in “Fates” and revealed in “Furies.” Characters have symbolic names: Aurelie (meaning golden) became Mathilde (mighty in battle) Lancelot and Gawain, the medieval knights of the Round Table Ariel, Shakespeare’s prankster spirit in “The Tempest.” Lotto’s classic “fatal flaw” may lie in his faith in his wife’s purity, a belief which destroyed the end of two decades of marital joy. “Fates and Furies” is orchestrated in the form of Greek drama, with the narrator’s asides reminiscent of a chorus. Among them, in another twist of fate, was the son Lotto did not know he had. After Lotto’s death, she lived in solitude, with occasional sexual encounters.

Lotto yearned for children, but never knew Mathilde had aborted his baby and then had herself sterilized believing her children would be monsters. Yet, unloved except by Lotto, “the sum of her life, she saw, was much greater than the sum of love.” Mathilde’s apparent gentleness and kindness were superficial she was ambitious and at times cruel, always knowing what she wanted. Her uncle suggested she work as a model to earn college tuition, but, as fate would have it, Mathilde’s tuition at Vassar was paid by Ariel, an art dealer with whom she entered into an erotic, masochistic relationship, an exchange of sexual slavery for college tuition. “Her uncle’s in Pennsylvania was only a place to stay, chill and dim, not a home … her loneliness was so huge it took the form of the upstairs hallway, dark and lined with locked doors.” She changed her name to Mathilde. When she was 11, Mathilde came home from school one day to find her grandmother murdered in her bed. Rejected by her parents at the age of four for having been responsible for her baby brother’s death, she was sent to stay with her louche Paris grandmother, where she slept in a closet while the grandmother “entertained.” In the second part of the book, “Furies,” Mathilde reveals herself, beginning with a horrific childhood in France. When Lotto died at 46 of a heart attack, Mathilde was distraught. Their partnership and marriage seemed uniquely happy. The play started Lotto on a successful career as a playwright with Mathilde as his muse, protector and editor. One drunken night, Lotto wrote a play, which Mathilde polished and edited.

Fates and furies book