While the reader sees some of her work as her husband’s champion and sometimes puppeteer, she is given no insight into who Mathilde truly is. “Hers was a quiet, subtle warfare, but she had always been a warrior.” Throughout the “Fates” half of the story, Mathilde is cold, without history or much of a present, appropriately given the moniker “the Dragon Wife”. Lotto is shocked to discover that he has cast himself the villain, baffled that the audience and his wife are enraged by his misogyny.Īnd what of the “wife”? Mathilde is an enigma, a slowly revealed mystery. …If women have historically demonstrated less creative genius than men, it’s because they’re making their creations internal, spending the energies on life itself.” No matter what Shakespeare did, it’s so much less than your average illiterate woman of his age who had babies. When a woman has a baby, she’s creating so much more than just a made-up world on the page! She’s creating life itself, not just a simulacrum. “We’re all given a finite amount of creativity, just like we’re give a finite amount of life, and if a woman chooses to spend hers on creating actual life and not imaginary life, that’s a glorious choice. During a panel presentation, Lotto exposes his unenlightened core, digging deeper and deeper while expecting applause. Just how blind and misguided Lotto is, the reader and Lotto’s adoring public soon discover. To him, sex is “vigorous frustration abatement”, a way to exorcise his demons while blessing whomever is game with his attention. Once he meets and immediately proposes to his future wife, Lotto goes from falling into bed after bed to contentedly surfing one woman’s wake, unaware that she is behind his every success. Lotto is a gregarious creature, a man who simultaneously acts a serial womanizer and sees himself as a benign lover of women, indiscriminate and therefore noble in his conquests. Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite is the hero of the first half of the novel, a man who since early childhood rides the tide of life, letting “fate”, and more often women, determine his path.

The old adage tells us that “There are two sides to every story.” Lauren Groff has cleverly split up her acclaimed novel “Fates and Furies” in deliberate, literal homage to this concept.

Fates and furies goodreads