Book Review: Arcadia

Arcadia: A Novel by Lauren Groff (New York: Voice, 2012. 304 pp)

Born in Cooperstown, New York, Lauren Groff graduated from Amherst College and later earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was awarded the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville, and has had residencies and fellowships at Yaddo, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale. Groff’s first book, The Monsters of Templeton, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons.

Utopia 

“And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.” Acts 2:42-47 

These words, written so long ago, represent the epitome of Christian living for many traditions. When people plant churches, when they imagine a bustling community, they cite these ancient words. Let’s eat together; let’s hold everything in common; let’s give to those in need.

Outside of the church, people feel the draw of community. For some, utopia is small-town USA; for others, it’s urban density.

In each of our unique ways, we’re all trying to relate

But is such a utopian community possible?

Results suggest not.

The Search for Peace in Western New York 

Photo by Christos Tsoumplekas

Lauren Groff’s generational narrative, Arcadia, focuses on a hippie commune named “Arcadia” located in Western New York. Much like the people in the Biblical book of Acts, the hippies of Arcadia desire to live wholly together. Bit Stone, the first child of the commune, lives with his Father, Abe, and his mother, Hannah under the leadership of hippie-musician, Handy.

“You were born on the Caravan, Abe says softly, when we were a bunch of groupies, following Handy around for spiritual food. Two dozen, max. Going to the concerts, staying for the meetings after. Everywhere we went, we saw communes, some that worked, others that didn’t Yurts and geodesic domes and sweat lodges and squatted-in mansions in the inner cities, and we started having an idea that even though everybody else was doing something along these lines, what we wanted to do was unusual. Pure. Live with the land, not on it. Live outside the evil of commerce and make our own lives from scratch” (14).

Cut into four separate scenes spanning Bit’s life, the reader gains a vision of “ideal” life and its emerging cracks in the foundation. As a child, during the first scene, Bit is a happy-go-lucky kid parented by a depressive mother and carpenter father with steely resolve.

A Fragile Utopia 

In scene two, we discover the early teenage years of Bit traversing the fully developed Arcadian commune. Close to a fully formed man, Bit begins to focus on girls, especially Helle, the daughter of the commune leader and emerging femme fatale.

As Arcadia develops, the fragile community strains with the weight of continued growth and invidious labor splits. Soon, this anti-capitalist utopia struggles to survive. In these years, Bit begins to understand imperfections in life. Reminiscing about a local Amish community, he ponders:

“The oldest Utopianists, Hannah said once, watching the Amish men who came to help with the harvest; for generations, they’ve lived the most perfect lives they can believe in. Bit imagines meals of animal flesh and hard chores and a huge family and girl cousins in demure frocks. What a relief it would be to live always among family. To be among people who all look like you, think like you, behave like you, have the same God to love and fear, a God angry enough to smite and loving enough to give, a God with an ear big enough to hold the secrets you whisper into it, who lets you empty yourself and walk back into your life, infinitely lighter. He feels loss for something he’s never known” (160).

Post-Utopia 

Scenes three and four explore the ramifications of Arcadia, years after its demise. Having married and produced a child with Helle, Bit raises his daughter in New York City and teaches photography. With the utopian community scattered, Bit’s reflections on the purpose of life feel unmoored.

It takes years for Bit to comprehend the differences in culture. “Fat” and “pale” people are normal. Arcadians were the ones undernourished and overly tan due to time in the sun. Nevertheless, Bit marvels at the complexity of the real world—the fragile balance between peace and the sword.

“It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won’t on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won’t let his hand hover over the red button and, in a moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all” (203).

Photo by Andrew Mace

Despite the pursuit of peace and happiness everlasting, Arcadia failed to produce utopia. But, Bit’s odd upbringing does not hinder him in the slightest. In fact, his draw to the city surrounds the need to be in community, albeit New York City is a community 8 million strong.

Does the Community Succeed? 

Even though I appreciate Groff’s attempts at sketching the desire for utopian community and the lengths by which we manufacture it, I did not overly enjoy Arcadia. Most importantly, the writing style felt stunted. While I often enjoy quick chapters because it keeps me head in the game, the staccato nature of Groff’s sections made Arcadia difficult to follow.

The desire for community is a deeply felt human wish. Arcadia explores these notions in great detail, yet I found the writing style detracting. If you want to dive into a character-driven plot set in a hippie commune, you might enjoy Arcadia, but I don’t necessarily recommend it broadly.

Verdict: 3 out of 5

What is utopia to you? Could it exist in real life? Do you try to create utopia in your life?
Share your thoughts below.

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Posted by: Donovan Richards

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Book Review: Genesis

Genesis: A Novel by Bernard Beckett (New York: First Mariner Books, 2010. 150pp)

Bernard Beckett (b. 1967) is a high school teacher in Wellington, New Zealand. He teaches math, drama, and English. He wrote Genesis while researching DNA mutations.

A Doctoral Thesis 

I entered a vacant room. A projector glowed, brightly illuminating the tension of the space. In the next fifteen minutes, I watched academics, some of whom I knew, fill the room in quiet anxiety. Then, my friend, a hopeful doctor, entered the room, connected his computer to the projector and nervously waited for three influential professors to ascend their thrones of power. As they entered the room, the one in the middle addressed the crowd, announcing,

“Welcome to the oral portion of the doctoral defense, we will now begin.”

I then watched my friend eloquently, yet nervously, present his dissertation to the panel. All the while, I understood that I would never willingly go through that kind of hell. In Genesis by Bernard Beckett, the protagonist, Anaximander, is presenting her thesis to a panel on the life of Adam Forde and the android Art, whose interactions are crucial to the forming of a new utopian republic after the world collapsed into apocalyptic ruin. Successful completion of said defense gains entry into “The Academy”, the elite governing institution of her perfected society.

“It would be a great honor to be selected, of course, bun Anax was clear that it was not honor that motivated her. To join The Academy was to serve the society. The society she loved. The finest society the planet had ever seen. To join The Academy was to take responsibility for the peace that settled over the shelters, and the laughter that echoed in the streets. The Academy designed the education program. The Academy moderated technology’s march. The Academy managed the balance between the individual and the cause, between the opportunity and the fear. The Academy pored over the details of the past, and learned from each advancement and every mistake. The Academy had met the Idea head on, and negotiated with it a lasting peace” (117).

Bernard Beckett

The Academy exists as the prominent answer to the decline of civilization. The world had become corrupt and inevitably engaged in war over oil, religion, etc. But, during Anax’s examination, she comes to the conclusion that perhaps The Republic isn’t the wonderful utopia she thought it was.

“The Republic, in the end, was a rational response to an irrational problem. To arrest change is to arrest decay. To bury the individual beneath the weight of the state, is to bury too the individual’s fears. It was possible to see what they were trying to do, but easy too to see, from this distance, that no state can ever weigh that heavily. Always, the individual’s fears will wriggle free” (116).

In order to gain admittance into The Academy, Anax presents her thesis on Adam Forde and Art over several grueling hours. She confronts unresolved questions of science and philosophy unexplored by her utopian counterparts. The Republic was formed in order to create a perfect society, but during the course of her examination, Anax begins to find flaws in The Republic, and in the story of Adam Forde.

Android versus Human 

Through her examination, Anaximander describes the interactions between Forde and Art, retelling the history with careful deliberate words. Anax exposes new and cohesive ideas on both Forde and Art, which consistently surprise her panel.

“I am saying only that Adam believes he should follow his head, I do not however believe he can. This is the second element. We see here the battle that every person faces. For while he may reason one way, he is still victim to his emotions” (86).

Consciousness

Anax tells that as Art and Forde get to know each other, their conversations become deeper, and Art grows far more intelligent than expected. In conversation, they tried to distinguish human from machine, from organic thought to robotic thought. As Art tells Forde (read from a transcript),

“I don’t know what it means to be conscious. You have stripped me of that certainty. I find, having you as my only companion, I am drawn toward treating you as if you are as conscious as I am, but perhaps this is nothing more than a prisoner’s kind of madness” (128).

In a time of everlasting peace and prosperity where the individual is crushed and the state rules supreme, Anax finds in her studies that no state can control every individual and someone will inevitably wiggle free. As she deliberates with her examiners, she finds what it really means to be human, and with a surprising twist at the end, this philosophically-minded novel is a treat. I sincerely recommend Genesis for you to read.

Verdict: 4.5 out of 5

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Posted by: Andrew Jacobson

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Book Review: A Paradise Built in Hell

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit (New York: Viking Press, 2009. 368 pp)

Based in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit has authored thirteen books on art, landscape, public and collective life, ecology, politics, hope, meandering, reverie, and memory. A product of the California education system, Solnit attended San Francisco State University as an undergraduate and the University of California, Berkeley where she received a Masters in Journalism. She is a contributing editor to Harper’s and often contributes articles to Tomdispatch.com. During her career, Solnit has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and a 2004 Wired Rave Award.

Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short

In his groundbreaking work, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes famously states, “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Describing life outside of a political institution, Hobbes believes that humanity resorts to a chaotic competition for scarce resources. Under this assumption, Hobbes argues for the existence of social contracts and, ultimately, the importance of an absolute sovereign.

A Selfless Humanity

With A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit offers a discourse contrary to this Hobbesian state of nature. For the critical thesis of the work, Solnit suggests that the gracious and altruistic actions of communities encountering disaster provide evidence for a selfless humanity.

In this tome, Solnit outlines the aftermath of five disasters in the past century. These events are:

1. The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906;
2. The Halifax Explosion;
3. Mexico City’s Earthquake; 
4. 9/11;
5. And Hurricane Katrina.

The Influence of Hollywood

While Hollywood mimics the Hobbesian state of nature in its disaster movies, Solnit’s sociological work suggests that horrific disasters function as a unifier rather than a divider. She writes,

“Near death experiences and encounters with one’s own mortality are often clarifying, tools with which to cut away inessentials and cleave to the essence of life and purpose” (103).

The Classical Form of Anarchy

For Solnit, these actions in the wake of catastrophes illustrate a classical form of anarchy. Of course, the term “anarchy” in today’s age carries significant baggage; it conjures tattooed punk rockers citing the term while destroying property and people’s lives.

Anarchy in a classical sense, however, denies the necessity of ruling institutions. Its etymology comes from Greek: “An” means “without” and “archy” means “ruler.”  In other words, classical anarchists believe that humanity contains the capability of living in harmony without an authority.  

What about Looting?

At this point, I assume the objection, “what about looting” pops into your mind. Solnit recognizes this point early in her argument. She claims with much backing evidence that fears of looting and disorder begin with a panic of the elite. Those in power have the most to lose when the status quo is interrupted.

Thus, after a disaster, the common citizens unite and the elites seek to reassert authority. As such, people in authority seek property over life. What is the difference between looting and raiding a store for life-saving supplies? Why do we consider looting horrible while such actions are, more often than not, performed with altruistic intentions? For the elite, preserving property is more important than preserving life.

Utopian Society

Ultimately, Solnit uses these extraordinary examples to make a case for a classical form of anarchy and an attempt at creating a utopian society. For her, these disasters prove that humanity is capable of noble self-governance. Yet, she sadly admits,

“The conundrum we call human nature readily rises to the occasion of a crisis and as readily slacks off when the living is easy” (119).

It Takes One Bad Apple to Ruin a Pie

This admission sums up my problem with this book. Written in an unwavering style, it is clear from page one that Solnit has a distinct purpose for writing the book. She wants to convince her readers that elites ruling under the form of a government are unnecessary.

As such, her disaster stories feel cherry picked. Of course good people engage in altruistic actions during heinous acts of nature. This fact, however, does not guarantee that humanity on the whole is capable of acting well at all times.

It takes one bad apple to ruin a pie. Likewise, government often functions for the one bad apple more than it does for the rest of society. Of course, civic leadership is capable of making atrocious mistakes and I am not arguing for a business-as-usual government. I am only contending that Solnit’s thesis might be too simplistic. Institutions can serve a purpose just as much as they can be the problem. Likewise, common citizens can perform good deeds just as easily as they can act poorly.

Therefore, I have a hard time recommending A Paradise Built in Hell. Rebecca Solnit tells intriguing stories about people acting selflessly in the wake of horrible disasters. As such, it is important to know that humanity outside of its government boundaries does not act brutishly like Thomas Hobbes suggests. However, the existence of these stories does not necessitate the promotion of anarchy over common forms of government.