13. On the final page of the novel, we’re told that Bit “has always loved the voices of women.” Consider the various women who gather to help when Hannah falls ilclass="underline" Astrid; Luisa, the nurse; Dr. Ellis Keefe. What valuable qualities does each of these women possess? In what ways are they different?
14. What effect does Groff’s decision to include the SARI pandemic have on the story?
15. Bit challenges his students to take what he calls a “digital fast,” going without any electronic communication technology (cell phone, computers, GPS, etc.) for as long as possible. Try it. Go for twelve hours. Keep track and write down the various responses and realizations you have. Afterward, assess the benefits and dangers and what you think a healthy relationship with such technologies might be.
16. At one point, Bit recalls how, as a boy, he made lists of beautiful things, a “litany” he would whisper to his mother to try to stir her out of depressive sleep. As an adult, in the midst of his troubles with his mother and wife, he does so again, this time for himself. Read his, and then try to make your own. Be specific to your personal experience. Then consider how such a gesture affects you and what role it might play in our everyday lives.
A Conversation with Lauren Groff
The tone and setting of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia are both so different, but family seems to be a pervasive theme in both books. Can you tell us a little bit about your inspiration for Arcadia?
Family is definitely a pervasive theme in both books. I was in my twenties when I wrote The Monsters of Templeton and hadn’t yet started a family of my own, so my concern was with a larger idea of family as a historical construct and as a form of legitimacy. This time around, I began this book when I was pregnant with my first son, and I was uncomfortable, at the very core of my being, with the ethical implications of bringing a child into a world that is already overburdened and uncertain. I always turn to research as a solace, and I fell in love with the wild-eyed idealists, people who wrote utopian tracts and people who actively formed intentional communities, the ones who decided that they must do something to change their world.
The end of Arcadia almost seems dystopian, with a look into a future that is not entirely rosy. What led you to take the story in that direction, with a look into the past that you could easily imagine, and a look into the future that no one can be sure of?
The utopian and the dystopian are points on the same continuum: both are deeply concerned with how the present is tipping into the future. Both are invested with enormous amounts of anxiety, except that utopian anxiety focuses on active amelioration, and dystopian anxiety seems to sour into fear. In my research, I saw many 1960s counterculture idealists become, over time, obsessed with things like Peak Oil and gold and how to live off-grid, a kind of palpable belief that society is at the brink of failure. They’re not wrong. It’s hard to raise a child these days and not fear doom. This book was my argument with myself for hope.
How easy — or difficult — was it to inhabit the mind of Bit as a young boy, and later as a man?
All I had to do for Bit as a child was to think of my own son and imagine how he’d react to the world he was in. I was lucky in that the scope of my book was so broad: if you know a child’s foundational experiences, you know the man he’ll become.
Were any of the characters in the book drawn from anyone that you know?
Bit comes from my little boy, Beckett. My children hadn’t been born when I started the book, so Bit began as a projection of what Beckett could be and slowly aligned with my actual son as they both grew. My husband lent his personality to Abe, and when I was little, my father fell off the roof of our garage, narrowly missing paralysis, so Abe’s injury is the nightmare inverse of my father’s. Astrid’s fierceness and Hannah’s sadness are my own.
What is your next project?
My stories are soft green things that can’t be shared before they’ve had time to become tough and resilient. If I talk about them too early, they’ll die. My husband is the only person on earth who has any idea what I’m working on, but that’s because I talk in my sleep.
About the Author
Lauren Groff is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Monsters of Templeton and the critically acclaimed short story collection Delicate Edible Birds. She has won Pushcart and PEN/O. Henry prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. Her stories have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, One Story, and Ploughshares, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2007 and 2010, and Best New American Voices 2008. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and two sons.