The book begins and ends in Arcadia, but Bit is always at the center of the narrative. Bit, however, is enchanted only with Helle, Handy’s daughter, whose enigmatic spirit will bring Bit both joy and sorrow.īit’s story is told in four balanced chapters: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and middle age. Enigmatic and precocious, Bit is admired by everyone, but he’s especially beloved by women-his mom and her fellow communards, the mysterious old lady he meets in the woods, the girls of his childhood. The boy believes he has memories of this pre-natal life.īecause he is tiny, Ridley is known as Bit. The group eventually finds property in upstate New York. Handy is not as malevolent or megalomaniacal as the Bhagwan, nor as theologically insistent, but he too claims his sexual privileges.

His birth interrupted his vagabond parents’ travels from Oregon to Colorado, following their charismatic leader, a musician named Handy, who will continue to dominate life on the commune, a sort of benign good ol’ boy version of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Over nearly three hundred pages, she brilliantly evokes the earnest hopes and evaporating ideals of the communards.Īrcadia is seen through the eyes of Ridley Stone, a boy named for the town in Wyoming where he was born. Lauren Groff smartly sets Arcadia, her fictional enquiry into this new age version of communal zeal, in that same region of upstate New York. Communes sprang up all over the country, and the perceptive, artistically-inclined children raised in that world-Storm Large or Joanna Rose, to take two local examples-would make art from their complicated childhoods. The alienated hippies and lefties of the nineteen-sixties would blow on those ancient embers and summon flames to light the way for a new generation of true believers. Mormonism is the most enduring vestige of the millenarian, perfectionist, and communitarian impulses that inspired such sects as the Shakers and the Millerites to dream of a better world a coming. Just down the street from us, the elderly surviving women of a celibate sect that aimed to proselytize its way to heaven still walked the grounds of their compound in petticoats and bonnets. Known as the burned-over district because it was aflame with religious fervor, western New York in the first half of the 19th century was as thick with prophets as the eastern Mediterranean had been in the early Christian era. When I was in graduate school at the University of Rochester in the late sixties, the embers of the Second Great Awakening were still smoldering to ash in upstate New York.

Arcadia lauren groff review