Chris

The Idle Book Club 11: Fates and Furies

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Finished!  Loved the book up until

 

Lotto's play writing career took off.  Purely personally, I hate experiencing art about wild success in art.  Really gets me mad.

 

The perspective in the first half feels like a portrayal of Lotto, infected by Lotto.  I hate him, but that feels like I made the decision.  Lotto's section forgets and moves beyond bad moments as fast as Lotto could suppress them.  There's a really nice feeling of accumulation by the time he dies.  Hit that mortality button for me real strong.

 

I loved how before Lotto's success the book would shift perspectives halfway through paragraphs.  It had a fun, wild feel.  I figure she shifted away from that as Lotto and Mathilde became more isolated as they aged, it felt purposeful, but I missed it.

 

So, loved, then liked.  Happy to have read it.   :)

 

Question about the bracketed text:

[suspend them there, in the mind’s eye: skinny, young, coming through dark toward warmth, flying over the cold sand and stone. We will return to them. For now, he’s the one we can’t look away from. He is the shining one.]
From the second chapter of Fates.
 
I never felt such a strong presence past this moment from the bracketed text.  I have in my head that it's a Greek Chrous?  My Greek lit knowledge is not good, so I'm curious if anyone has any theories on its presence.  And why it seems to dwindle in appearance and purpose as the book goes along...

 
Also my alma mater is all over this book!  They should have had better fact checking regarding the campus and Poughkeepsie, but otherwise I was happy to fill in the details with my own place-memory.

Regarding your first spoiler - I completely agree. I enjoyed the book overall but I find it very awkward reading any fiction where

an artist creates something great and that thing is then shown to the reader. I am not a fan of theatre, so don't really feel qualified to critique it. But in the chapter where one of Lotto's plays is described, all it served to do was break any sense I had of him being a great writer. (Maybe that was the point? I don't know. I assume that Lotto was in fact meant to be a competent playwright since he was apparently critically acclaimed by all but Phoebe Delmar, and apparently made a real career out of it.)

 

It would have been a lot easier for me to swallow if his writing was kept completely hidden. At least then I could believe that it's something special. Once it's displayed it becomes very difficult to believe that he is as good as he is supposed to be.

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Great episode. Good to hear Sarah's opinion about the book. I definitely had a similar journey to Chris throughout the episode; I came in not liking the book (especially the ending, probably more so than Chris) and came out, well, ambivalent? I still don't think I regard the book positively but I definitely have a more complex understanding of the book and what about it I think works and what I think doesn't. It also allowed me to have a good think about male privilege and the relationships I have with the women in my life. 

 

I was excited to have a new book to read next month so I was a bit disappointed to hear it was a book I've already read  :wacko: . However, I came out of Never Let Me Go feeling a similar way to how I felt coming out of Fates and Furies, so it'll be neat to see if my perspective is changed at all by the podcast. Maybe I'll skim through again because it's been about a year since I read it. I'll be waiting patiently for the next episode and excited to hear what you choose for Episode 13.

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It was great to hear the podcast!  It was fun to hear Chris and Sarah's takes on the book.  I find it revealing and a little disconcerting that a lot of Sarah's points were totally new ideas and even a little alien to me, and I resonated a lot with Chris's experience of the book.  It makes me really appreciate having Sarah's viewpoint on the podcast, and I hope it continues to make me reflect on these books in new ways.


The point Sarah made about the book juxtaposing standard masculine and feminine stories with its two leads was something I noticed but didn't really reflect on until she mentioned it.

I guess if I think about the book as a critique of writing and the roles of men and women in a marriage, as well as characters in the literary canon it makes it both more thought-provoking, and recontextualizes my distaste for the characters and the structure of the ending.  I still feel really conflicted about the book for a lot of the things people mentioned throughout this thread, reference almost for its own sake, the chorus, a cartoonishness to the characters that make them insufferable.

I also bounced hard off the soaring success of Lotto in the middle, I remember reading the transition from Mathild telling him he'll be great while he hesitates and starts to encourage himself (a piece of writing I really enjoyed, his hesitancy, the idea of giving up one dream for another, etc) to him being a great playwright.

At that point, I dropped some expletives in frustration, stopped the audiobook, and had to go run off my frustration.  As someone who has done a transition to creative work at a similar age, a soaring creative success as deus ex machina is completely infuriating.  Not that significant to the book as a whole, but I appreciated the frustration with that narrative device.

Did anyone have strong feelings about making Gwinny a viewpoint character right at the end?  The whole period post investigation felt a little terse and not as fully realized to me.  In a book where only a few characters take the POV, it felt strange to give Gwinny that sequence, and then it was compelling writing, but didn't feel like it did anything particularly powerful.  For a book that makes choices that seem very intentional to build something structural, it felt like a strange choice.  I'm probably missing something, but I was curious if other people reacted to that.



I've been meaning to read Kazuo Ishiguro for years, so I'm glad for the motivation.  Love the podcast, so glad it's back!

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Did anyone have strong feelings about making Gwinny a viewpoint character right at the end?  The whole period post investigation felt a little terse and not as fully realized to me.  In a book where only a few characters take the POV, it felt strange to give Gwinny that sequence, and then it was compelling writing, but didn't feel like it did anything particularly powerful.  For a book that makes choices that seem very intentional to build something structural, it felt like a strange choice.  I'm probably missing something, but I was curious if other people reacted to that.

Yeah I wasn't crazy about this either, mainly because

it just seemed like the number of shocking reveals related to so many different characters sort of went beyond the pale

. We obviously ended up focusing on different aspects of the book but yeah I originally intended to bring that up.

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Did we actually get any non-male opinions about the book besides Sarah's? Her mention of finding men's reactions to Lotto interesting made me wonder (and also bristle a bit before I got over myself).

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Amusingly I finally decided to read t his book on the 8th, without realizing the episode was out. I finished it yesterday. Haven't listened to the episode yet, so here are my pre-episode thoughts:

I think the book would have worked much better for me if the two halves had been swapped. Putting Mathilde's stuff second has two deleterious effects, I think. The first is that it makes her character into a second fiddle for Lotto's story, because her side of things is basically filling in gaps, fleshing out scenes, and so on rather than standing up on its own. I don't know if I agree with dustincorreale that the whole thing is essentially Lotto's perspective, but I do think that putting Mathilde second has the effect of making things seem like that. The second reason is that all of the wacky batshit plot twists come in the Mathilde section, and it just makes everything feel like a crass page-turning thriller that strings along the surprises just to keep you guessing. I don't have a problem with crass thrillers in the abstract - some of my favorite movies are effectively nothing except surprise after surprise, for instance - but when this book effectively turned into The Da Vinci Code or whatever I really started to lose interest, because I was hoping it had interesting things to say about the relationship, when really all it wanted to do was drop a series of implausible surprises. Ending with the most implausible surprise of all (guess who slept with Lotto's secret illegitimate son!!!!!) just soured me more.

Putting the Mathilde stuff first would've solved both those issues and it would've made the book more honestly focused on Lotto rather than accidentally focused on Lotto, I think. Lotto's kind of a sad sack and that would be more tragic and affecting if first we get all this crazy turmoil going on and then we swap to Lotto's perspective and it's the much more trite story that makes up the first part of the book.

I share Mangela Lansbury's disappointment that this book reads like someone experimenting a little bit but not a lot. When it swapped to a play to describe the waiter being bribed to dump the wine on Mathilde I wasn't sure how I felt about it - why the shift there? What is that doing? Ditto for at the end, when we get the story of Lotto's illegitimate child but it's all being written by Mathilde, albeit with assurances from the square bracket chorus that Mathilde has "Antoinette in her bones" or something such that we're maybe supposed to be able to trust the fiction Mathilde's writing?

I'm not really sure how trustworthy those square brackets are and I'm not sure how happy I am with them either. I assume they're supposed to be the chorus but they are far too quiet for that and I never got a consistent idea about where they are coming from. I soured on them a bit when early in the book they report that Lotto, being tall and lanky, gets less blood to his dick so he's not as great a lover as he could be. That's not how tall lanky people work (I'm a tall lanky dude) but more importantly that's not how sex works, so I'm pretty sure the square brackets are supposed to be idiots, but if they're idiots they never really added anything interesting with their idiocy, just a lot of incidental comments that I can't trust because they're dopes. If they're not supposed to be idiots and this book just has a weirdly restrained conception of what it takes to have sex well, then I'm just really at sea about what those square brackets are up to.

In general I didn't enjoy the book a ton. It briefly looked like it would pick up near the very end of Lotto's story, because when he died or whatever the prose got more interesting, but then it went straight back to normal and started doubling down on wacky plot twists and lost my interest. It feels like this book had little to say: much of it is caught up in character sketches of Lotto and to a lesser degree Mathilde, but neither of these people are particularly unique (Mathilde is a walking bag of stereotypes, particularly) and it doesn't really have anything to say about the people it sketches.

Looking forward to listening to the episode! I'll probably report back after that.

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I liked this episode a lot, even though I didn't get a chance to read the book. I hope you two continue to disagree on things.

Guaranteed to happen, haha.

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Guaranteed to happen, haha.

 

Yes! The disagreement warmed my heart. The whole episode was wonderful.

 

On Chris's problem with the believability of Lotto not visiting his mother:

 

I do this with my family. Both my dad and my sister have had serious health issues pop up in the past couple of years and in both instances I was able to fully dissociate from the situation. Whenever someone asked, "how's your sister doing?", my face flushed and I realized I haven't checked in in months. It's my natural coping mechanism; internally obliterate the complicated familial relationships entirely.

 

I feel like Groff gave enough detail alluding to Lotto's complicated feelings towards his mother and the beach house that became her home, that it satisfied the fact that he never went to visit. Mathilde's complicated excuses didn't require much backing, they just needed to be present to allow Lotto to continue in his habit.

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Oh, yeah, Lotto's ability to be dissuaded from not seeing a mother he is royally pissed off with for missing his wedding is entirely credible to me. I've seen my fair share of such contact-dropping on one side of my family (even done so myself in a similar manner). It's really easy to be 'manipulated' into not doing something you don't want to do.

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Did we actually get any non-male opinions about the book besides Sarah's? Her mention of finding men's reactions to Lotto interesting made me wonder (and also bristle a bit before I got over myself).

 

The Slate Audio Book Club had a podcast with this novel with 3 women that you can listen to, I don't remember anything specific that was said but I think the opinions were close to those on this show. The idea that male privilege is blinding us from seeing the Lottos around us could be true but it's not like men don't have to deal with other oblivious men who have unearned success in life so I'm not sure how that works unless you are the oblivious one.

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Haven't finished the cast yet but I'm really enjoying listening to Chris and Sarah's takes on it. But one thing I couldn't get over in the second half of the book was

 

every time the PI lady shows up in a different disguise, all I could think was Gene Parmesan and Lucille Bluth:

 

 

I get that it supposed to be larger than life or something, but god, it was just too ridiculous.

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But one thing I couldn't get over in the second half of the book was ~spoiler~

Ahaha, incredible. That is a perfect comparison.

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I really enjoyed this podcast, though I haven’t read ‘Fates and Furies’. I’m going to try to read ‘Never Let Me Go’ before the next episode so I have something more to add!

 

I’d certainly agree with Sarah’s point about ‘A Little Life’ and the weird sense of timelessness that book has. It’s not just the use of slang, but it also never seems to make many references to contemporaneous technology or world events within the fiction. It feels like an attempt to lend the book a timeless quality, which is odd because for the most part ‘A Little Life’ still very much feels like a novel that could only have been written in the 2010s. 

 

Still, I don’t think it’s an uncommon tendency in fiction, or a regrettable one. Perhaps you could say the same thing about the work of Henry James or Edith Wharton: their books were undoubtedly products of their time, even if they aren't necessarily about their time.

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I really enjoyed this podcast, though I haven’t read ‘Fates and Furies’. I’m going to try to read ‘Never Let Me Go’ before the next episode so I have something more to add!

 

I’d certainly agree with Sarah’s point about ‘A Little Life’ and the weird sense of timelessness that book has. It’s not just the use of slang, but it also never seems to make many references to contemporaneous technology or world events within the fiction. It feels like an attempt to lend the book a timeless quality, which is odd because for the most part ‘A Little Life’ still very much feels like a novel that could only have been written in the 2010s. 

 

Still, I don’t think it’s an uncommon tendency in fiction, or a regrettable one. Perhaps you could say the same thing about the work of Henry James or Edith Wharton: their books were undoubtedly products of their time, even if they aren't necessarily about their time.

 

I'm glad I got to talk about A Little Life, if briefly, since that book is too long for us to ever officially read on the podcast.

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I liked Fates and Furies, but that's mostly based on having enjoyed the first half and feeling like it stuck the landing in the last two chapters.

 

I read that first half as almost a farce about Lancelot's amazing success. I saw Lancelot as a sort of lovably obtuse success magnet who stumbled into writing highly referential, showy yet ultimately empty plays that just impressed the critical theatre establishment. I liked his character because I often fear that I am his character, to some degree, obviously minus the artistic success. For instance, in the context of the story I could see that what Lotto said on that panel was utterly wrong, but it took me just long enough to recognize that that it felt like I could feasibly say something that dumb if I just wasn't careful. I worry about being that type of man, blithely floating through life, unmindful of my privilege and unmindful of how my words and deeds impact those around me, and it was fun to read about that character. Whenever I got tired of being inside of this oblivious POV, the book would move into someone else's mind. My favorite character in the whole first half was Rachel, and her sections, however brief, carried me through a lot of it. She gave me the contrasting POV to know for sure that Lotto's was meant to be a commentary on that type of man. I was looking forward to a second half that would subvert the first by giving me more of Mathilde's and Rachel's thoughts and experiences.

 

But then it just sort of turned into a boilerplate thriller, with ridiculous plot twist after ridiculous plot twist. It just started to feel like a story about bad people relentlessly beaten down by the actions of worse people. I read most of the last third through one giant eye-roll, right up to the last two chapters, which dropped the whole thriller facade and got right down to what really worked: pitch-perfect character moments that showed you who these folks are and how they all fit together in messy, organic ways. And for what it's worth, I think Fates and Furies as it is has the perfect last sentence for the book that I wish it was.

 

On another note, here's a suggestion for people who relate to what I said above: You Must Remember This, the Hollywood history podcast by Karina Longworth. Her impeccably delivered stories of Hollywood's first century retain all of that juicy realistic relationship material, but excise the cruft by making the characters feel real right through the ends of their stories. Probably because they all were/are real people.

 

I'm really super duper happy the Idle Book Club is back. I'm a long time listener, first time participant, but I'm thrilled. If I can fit it in with this month's Gravity's Rainbow life partner co-read, I'll hopefully check out both Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.

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Idle Thumbs holiday preview brought me over to the idle book club, Wow. I fucking loved this book.  To back peddle just a tad, let me start by saying that I have a minor in classics, and read/translate ancient Greek tragedies as both a hobby and therapeutically to help me deal with some Iraq War PTSD shenanigans.

 

My favorite part was near the beginning where Denton Thrasher asks about the difference between comedy and tragedy, with his response being that there is no difference, and that it is simply a matter of perspective.  This was also what lead me personally to love the classics, and got me through some pretty dark times. I think this really set the tone for the book as you see the world through very different perspectives.

 

I honestly have over 6 pages of hand written notes about the different connections between this book and several different Greek tragedies. I was giddy with excitement to come here and discuss all of the call backs, and what they are insinuating in the book because of this (I did once write a 40 page paper titled "Cannibalism in Homer" from the original Greek). Sadly, right off the bat the podcast brought up these numerous ancient Greek references and simply stated that they could tell there was a lot going on, but they didn't want to look any of it up.  Boom, I was crushed.  

 

I had to step away for a few weeks, and it took me this long just to make it to the forums to write this much. Sadly I don't think I will continue with the podcast. That's not to say Chris and Sarah didn't do an excellent job, I just thought this book was about so much more than what was presented on the surface, and it hurt to have the most vital part brushed aside so quickly. As you can tell I am an emotional dope, don't take it personally. I wasn't going to write anything at all, but it was eating at me so I figured it would be better to get it off my chest.

 

P.S. I am a Mathilde, my wife is a Lotto.

 

*Edit: not sure if any part of this needs to be under spoilers, but sadly I am not what you call "forum savy."

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Are you similarly sad that they didn't go into all the Shakespeare stuff, or are you fine that they skipped over that? Everyone's allowed to care about what they care about, obviously, but if you're writing off the podcast for not focusing on your bugbear while you're fine with them not having focused on someone else's bugbear, that's a little myopic, no?

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Are you similarly sad that they didn't go into all the Shakespeare stuff, or are you fine that they skipped over that? Everyone's allowed to care about what they care about, obviously, but if you're writing off the podcast for not focusing on your bugbear while you're fine with them not having focused on someone else's bugbear, that's a little myopic, no?

I don't read that post as writing off, but rather as disappointment, which is understandable if you're looking forward to a specific subject coming up. No need to start calling people myopic over that.

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Sorry that neither of us were familiar enough with the Greek Classics to comment on them. I understand the frustration, but I think we did a descent job of explaining on the cast why the references left us so cold in the first place. Even if I knew everything that Groff was alluding to, I probably still would have found the numerous and cloying references more of a distraction. I liked parts of the references (the Greek chorus, Oediups, Arthurian legend) but I was not impressed with the sum, mostly because added up it felt less like Groff was trying to impart meaning and more like she was trying to impress with a knowledge of classic literature. But if someone with an actual background in Greek classics has a counter-argument to what the references contributed, please feel free to share it! I'd love to hear it.

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I think we'd all be interested in hearing your perspective on the book. You can't expect everyone to have a deep knowledge of the Greek Classics. These discussions are for sharing these kinds of insights.

Yeah, I'd be super interested in at least seeing the six pages of notes. I hope my comment didn't come off as too accusatory - I think a nicer way of putting it would be that the way I think about this podcast, it's not like Sarah and Chris are special authorities or arbiters of what's worth talking about, in the sense that if they don't bring something up then it's not part of the discussion. As far as I'm concerned, everyone else in these threads is just as much a part of the conversation, and if you were really looking forward to a discussion of all the Greek myth stuff, you don't have to wait for Sarah and Chris to do it for you: you can do it yourself, with us (and Sarah and Chris, even!) here in the thread!

So, in other words, don't be sad that other people aren't talking about what you want to talk about. Instead, just talk about what you want to talk about! I think the best way to get people talking about something is to start talking about it yourself, rather than hoping they'll talk about it, especially if you're enthusiastic about the topic and have six pages of notes to touch the conversation off.

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