Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Arcadia

by Lauren Groff

Hyperion, 2012

ISBN: 978-140130872

289 p.p.

Cult, drugs, theft, dishonesty, and deception. When you hear those words, what comes to mind? Not exactly thoughts of happiness and inspiration, right? Lauren Groff’s novel, Arcadia, takes the slightly dangerous allure of a 1970s cult and peels back the outer layers, revealing a deeper story within.

Readers follow along as Bit is born into the world of Ersatz Arcadia, a community of free spirits, led by Handy, the group’s moral spearhead. With the help of an omniscient narrator, the story begins during the community’s early days, when home still consisted of a convoy of secondhand trucks and the shambled house in the distance was only a dream for the future. They called this ragtag collection of mobile homes Ersatz Arcadia; a blueprint for peace.

Eventually, the community comes into possession of that great big house on the hilltop and begins the reconstruction of Arcadia House. Together, Bit’s father and the rest of the Arcadians take up their nails and planks and set about restoring the dilapidated building so they can finally have a place to call home.

Through memories of Bit’s early years, we come to learn the foundation of the community: equality, love, work, and openness to the needs of everyone. However, as Bit grows up in the days of the reconstruction, he discovers that this romanticized lifestyle Handy preaches about may only exist inside Arcadia’s walls. Their lifestyle, as it turns out, is nothing more than an outcasted realm of a much larger, much harsher society.

But there is darkness within Arcadia, too.

During the day, community members organize and build, replacing the old roof, rebuilding the fallen walls, and even sowing barley, soy, and marijuana into the fields and forests surrounding the property. At night, they get drunk on homemade Slap-Apple and sit in circles, canning wild berries for the winter and sharing their dreams of the future.

But when outside forces begin looking for reasons to shut Arcadia down and tear the community apart, Handy orders his brothers and sisters to run to the woods and do the only thing they can to save their family. They must pull up all their source of income and burn it to dust. They must destroy their hidden fields of weed. Secretly, Bit’s parents send him off to the woods to protect their private sector of pot, relying on him to save their investment from Handy’s desperate followers.

Altered by this experience, Bit eventually leaves the community, venturing out into the “real world” to make a new life for himself. It isn’t until years later when he is a parent himself that Bit is drawn back to the grounds of his childhood. When his mother falls ill, Bit and his daughter move back to Arcadia House where he not only makes amends with the woman that raised him, but also with the challenges of his past.

In the end, Arcadia is essentially the story of how important people are in shaping our ideas of home. Everyone around Bit is responsible for forming his home, both physically and spiritually. And while the people in his life come and go as Bit’s situation changes, his memories of them remain engrained in the fibers of his soul forever. Bit experiences Arcadia as a growing child and then returns as a full-fledged adult, each time experiencing a totally different version of this thing we call home.

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Laruen Groff is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel, The Monsters of Templeton, and with her second book, Arcadia, she snagged a spot on the New York Time Notable Books of 2012 list. Her work has also been published in journals such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, One Story, and Ploughshares. Her newest book, Fates and Furies, is set to come out September 2015. Today she lives in Gainesville, Florida with two sons and her husband.