Arcadia by Lauren Goff is a mish mash of yearnings, a misstopia
ARCADIA is a mish mash of yeanings, a misstopia
In the utopian community in Lauren Goff’s novel, Arcadia, life is a mish mash of yearnings--for food and love, beauty and a
human community perfect as nature. I take my utopias seriously and have some
knowledge of religious communities, such as the Shakers and the Amish, as well
as ecstatic cults, like the one in
Arcadia. Smartly, Goff gives them an Amish neighbor. This sober
religious community helps their indulgent neighbors learn to farm so they don’t
starve. And Arcadia returns the favor sending their midwives to aid the Amish,
but the commonality is not just about mutual aid but love of the land and their
people. Goff also shows in this story of a childhood on a commune, that sometimes there’s also a strong distaste of the same land and people..
The hero of Arcadia is Bit for Bit of a hippie, the
miracle baby who survives, though born premature and weighing only three pounds.
Through his eyes Arcadia is a physically beautiful place, but emotionally scary and erratic, mostly
because of the adults. There’s his mother Hannah, happy and golden in the
summer, gray and morose in the winter. Bit worries
about her and tries to take care of her, since, unlike Abe, his strong engineer
father, she suffers from their life of austere poverty; incessant work and
deprivation. Bit, who hears the muffled
conversations of the parents he sleeps between, knows his mother is
dissatisfied. This is not what she signed on for, when she and Abe helped found
Arcadia and signed over her trust fund.,
Bit is frequently hungry and cold, bored
with chores and the games of the “kid pack.” When Handy, the charismatic leader goes off
with his troupe to play music gigs, Abe decides to reclaim the rotting shell of Arcadia
House and build a real home. Instead of dwelling in the shanty town of eratz
Arcadia, they will live with toilets like regular people. And in several months, Abe organizes teams to renovate the place and make something grand. While the grownups work, Bit finds an
abandoned book of Grim’s fairytales that becomes his own secret world.
Arcadia's leader, Handy, does recreational drugs and enjoys
the tribute of the women and girls available
to him. His wife, the serious Swedish midwife, Astrid, accepts this, since all is held in common, from property to multiple mates and children,
though Hannah makes it clear Bit is hers alone. Equality is supposed to reign, though of course Handy and his favorites don’t work. The rest, especially Hannah and Abe, are responsible for
generating food, money, whatever is needed for the hundreds who call Arcadia home.
Bit, a sensitive boy, feels his mother’s despair and
wanting to understand life, takes his book literally and finds danger and magic
everywhere, including a mysterious white-haired woman, who lives in a cozy
shack and provides him with a safe haven. Like all utopias, this one eventually
collapses, after Cockaigne Day, a historic holiday Hannah organizes,
unaware that news of the commune’s celebration has attracted thousands of gate
crashers. There’s enough drugs and runaways to attract police and, when tragedy
strikes, the deed holder to Arcadia, Handy is taken to jail. That night is
a kind of coming of age for Bit. Now in his teens, he painfully recognizes his aching love for
Helle, Handy’s troubled daughter.
Ready or not for the real world, Bit’s family surfaces in Queens, where he goes to a regular school and is mistakenly put
ahead two years because of his advanced learning. His Arcadian friends are
scattered and Bit feels a loss of spirit with the absence of friends, who grew up with
him in the special community of the commune. He goes to college, becomes a photographer, his parents
split up. And he still has this feeling of huge loss until he meets Helle again. They marry and have
a child but Bit’s happiness is short lived. Helle, who ran wild and was lost in drugs and sex,
can’t take stability. She leaves Bit and her child, Grete, and he is wounded for years afterward. Bit does manage to unite his parents. They return to Arcadia, where his father has built a totally functional “off the grid” house.
One of the odd and not so successful aspects of this
novel is a sudden shift to the future, when the world is devastated by a killer
flu. After his father dies suddenly, though not of the flu since Arcadia is sufficiently isolated, Bit goes with Grete to help his mother now also dying. Finally, he is
able to come to terms with his old life and take what lies ahead
This is a novel very vividly imagined with an entirely
plausible counterculture world. Unfortunately, it gets caught up in a vortex of emotional tailspins that seem more self-referential than insightful about the utopian dream. So while I
admired the world and the characters stayed with me, I found this novel
unfulfilling. Far better to read Moore’s Utopia, Ken Kesey, and a nonfiction study of Utopian communities, like
the great transcendentalist one that attracted Emerson,the Alcotts and
Amy Beach.
SW
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