Arcadia

The language is gorgeous and unique. The tale is heart-wrenching, believable, and ultimately, uplifting.

My rating for this fine novel is a solid 4.5. It is the story of Ridley Stone--called Bit for reasons that are made clear during the story--and his life growing up in, growing out of, and growing to understand (mostly) a counterculture commune founded at the time of his birth: 1968.Lauren Groff's prose, at its best is breathy and luminous. The early part of the novel is told from a very young child's perspective, though not precisely in a child's voice. The result is a sense, almost, of magical realism. Very serious and adult behaviors and conversations are seen through the lens of love and childish normalcy, sometimes allowing the reader a great deal of dramatic irony--you know that some troubling things are afoot, but young Bit does not.Those who enjoy lush description and an unhurried pace will love especially the first part of the novel, those parts that happen during Bit's childhood. Props also for several plot choices that build a great deal of tension, enough to balance the moments of slow reveal, in this reader's opinion.There is so much about the communal life that Groff got right, that it is stunning to find that she is barely a blink above thirty. Having lived that life myself, I can say that these characters and their circumstances really aren't so stereotypical as one might imagine. I did feel from time to time that the author probably owes a debt of gratitude to work such as TC Boyle's Drop City and that wonderful counterculture classic Spiritual Midwifery (for example, the midwives of Arcadia referring to uterine contractions as "rushes"). In the end, though, Groff most certainly distilled her sources and made them, abundantly, her own.Just a few things dropped this novel out of the 5 star category for me, and not by much. One was a credibility problem with a commune functioning at this level for such a long time--into the early 1980s. There were enough seeds of human error sown (as there are in any such utopian endeavor) early on that I found it hard to believe that the same people would have held together for such a long time before the bottom dropped out. I felt that this time frame was somewhat forced on the author by her choice to end the narrative in the year 2018, with a middle-aged Bit and his return-of-sorts to Arcadia. I also was ambivalent with the choice to have a dystopian health crisis make such a noted appearance, to little actual effect. Finally, a minor and probably finicky loose-thread question: Why create that improbable and fascinating underground emergency tunnel between Arcadia House and the Octagonal Barn, and then allow it to drop out of the story almost completely?I sank into Arcadia and lived in it without coming up for air, and came away moved by its beauty and imagination, and beset with thoughts about days long gone, and how we move forward on our brief journeys by loving one another. A wonderful read.

There is a trend, a demand in modern society, to be BOMBARDED with stimulation, whether breathless "Breaking News!!" posts, trolling social media exchanges, the noise of frenetic advertising, reality TV, sitcoms, and comic book dramas, or even popular book genres filled with shirtless protagonists (those covers on Twitter!) or shallow but page-turning narratives. It's not easy for thoughtful, poetic, literary work to gain notice amidst the cacophony, so when one such work does -- something quiet, narratively unique, almost delicate in its visceral punch -- it is noteworthy.I've had ARCADIA on my Kindle for months, putting it off for a time when I was in the mood for something more thoughtful, something that required my attention, and when I finally picked it up this week, ready to immerse myself in its poetic prose, oh, what a gift I gave myself!Revolving around the "hippie commune" of Arcadia in western New York in the late 60s, it is a poignant, redolent, visceral memory piece wrapped around the main character, Bit, a small boy who grows up in the commune until events demand that he and his family face the outside world. Through the eyes of this curious, enduring, and endearing character, we are given a tactile, almost textural experience of what growing up in such a setting entailed: the smells, sounds, feelings, sensations, to the point that you can almost taste the yeasty bread baked daily or smell the hot berries growing in the sun as he dashes by on some forest adventure.The characters who fill the narrative, from adults who remind us of images we’ve seen of that time, to the children living by their wit and wonder, it is a story that is both non-judgmental in its rendering of that unique and memorable era, as well as a candid and unvarnished view of that history's impact on the lives and well-being of those involved.If you are looking for fast-paced, page-turning plot lines, or extreme character twists and turns, this is not your book. But if the notion of fully experiencing a seminal moment in history via another person's journey through that time pricks your interest, you will be deeply moved by this story. The profound relationships that stretch throughout Bit's life, the attachments, love, memories; heartaches, life-changing perceptions, all conspire to bring the reader into the WHOLE of the experience......to the point that by the book's I was emotionally filled, teary-eyed and yearning, nostalgic and appreciative of the moments, large and small, in my own history, when a glance, a breath, a connection between people makes one realize how fragile and precious life is, how strong our emotional ties, how important to make note of ALL we surround ourselves by, immerse ourselves in, deem integral to who we are."Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gestures, but to the passing breath."It is a beautiful ideal from an idealistic time. It remains a beautiful ideal, well expressed in a beautifully rendered book.

A friend loaned me Arcadia soon after it was published. She's a writer and a good critic and is not profligate with praise. So when she handed me her copy and said: you Have to read this! I did. Arcadia is one of the most unusual novels I've read. It's also a heartbraker. It's told from the point of view of an exceptional and exceptionally sensitive child growing up in a hippie commune. Lauren Groff's way of describing the child, Little Bit, and being inside his head to show us how he perceives the world, is astonishing. You are drawn in and feel fragile yourself as Bit's life unfolds. There are, in the book, some of the most lovely passages I've ever read. There are turns of phrases that take your breath away. Arcadia is a beautifully rendered, compelling read that will make you remember what it is to be human. I realize this may sound like hyperbole but pick the book up and read for yourself. I loved it.

This novel begins with a very young boy, nicknamed Bit,on a commune, Arcadia, in 1970s New York. He was born into the commune -called the Free People - and his parents, Hannah and Abe, are key figures. Much of the life on the commune is told through a child's eyes. We pass through a decade of life wherein the Free People experience some success and the much greater failure that characterised such experiments in social living. The author describes well the light and dark of such utopias.We next find Bit in his early 40s teaching in a city college. To describe the story from there on - to its conclusion in 2018 -would spoil the plot really. However, the author makes the point that modern city living may be just as dystopian as the hopeless hippy dreams of the 1960s. The conclusion finds us and Bit back in Arcadia in a very different world. Maybe Arcadia still offers some answers.The closest novel I can compare this with - if comparisons are valid in amazon reviews - would be TC Cooper's  Drop City . So much of writing on the modern commune - non-fiction and fiction - offers the standard "nice idea, but" analysis. However, Lauren Groff does a bit more. She takes her characters into the real world and the big city, and back again. In the end Lauren Groff pleads a more balanced nuanced view.Of course Arcadia has to succeed as a novel, as a good story and I did really like it. There are a number of characters who recur apart from Bit himself; the reader wants to know what happens to all the people we meet in the beginning. Each is explored both as a person contributing individually to the story. But Lauren Groff is also asking how can such people live together, what type of society works best. Does city living cause deviancy and crime and abuse? Does communal living cure it? Conversely does a commune without rules lead inevitably to dictatorship and abuse? I think the questions she asks are very material and explored well. Drop City

It is hard to describe all of the emotions that this book invokes in me, making it somewhat difficult to provide a objective perspective. One of the things about the book that I appreciate about the book is the absence of quotation marks, allowing for me to read in a flow but also alerting me to pay close attention to who is perhaps talking, while at the same time taking in the deathly handled poetic license the counterpoint of words that connect the observation with the statement of a persons speaking.I imagine that many people will use this book to point out how experimental life styles always doomed. It would be terribly wrong to use this book in such a way. What this book provides is a long breath of details that awaken the beauty that there can be, even in the sorrow of failure. For me, the message lay in the fact that we cannot deny ourselves adventure. Failure is part of the beautiful journey.

Really good read with some interesting themes around being an outsider/belonging/ childhood/charisma and leadership/idealism and realism. It's not up there in my top 10 ever (which is what I reserve the 5 stars for), but well worth reading.

In short, this book is fantastic. It took me a little while to get into, the lush prose and description were a lot to process. I read a few reviews for this book and it seems as though people either loved it or hated it. If you are not a lover of prose or early Margaret Atwood , this book probably isn’t for you.