A review by sctittle
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

2.0

Oh please. This is not a novel about marriage. It's about two narcissistic people who happen to get married. The first part is about the male, who's arrogant and clueless, and who gets sent away to prep school then college (Vassar) and never returns home again. Instead he falls in love with someone and gets married before they graduate and so his momma is pissed and disinherits him from his millions and he never sees her again. Instead he implausibly lives in a West Village apartment with his beautiful wife and, although he doesn't succeed with an acting career, he does succeed as a playwright--no, not just succeed but becomes world-famous. Then he dies. The other part of the book is about the woman he married, about whom he knows nothing except that she is beautiful and cleans her own toilets and is perfect. Of course, she's not, because she holds many dark secrets about her past, including being a courtesan, burning down her childhood house, and re-writing her husband's plays so that they will succeed. After her husband dies she seeks revenge on the person who she feels is responsible in part for his death by hiring a lesbian investigator who uncovers a Bernie Madoff-like ponzi scheme (of course) that will of course bring down the entire American economy, but then she decides not to, for reasons I won't go into here. Both parts of the book take pages to end in dramatic, over-written scenes. The entire novel, I would guess, is supposedly modeled after a Shakespeare play and since I don't know my Shakespeare that well I can't say how successful this metaphor/trope is, but I am furious that I spent so much time with this book and really cannot believe what gets passed off as "good writing" these days.