(Arcadia, by Lauren Groff, is the story of the rise and fall of a hippie commune, examined through the perspective of one of its residents. Bit is a child of Arcadia, the first baby born after the community was founded. Called “Bit” because of his tiny size – he was three pounds at birth – he is loved and petted by the entire community as a child. But the community is diseased from within – Handy, the founder and leader, becomes corrupt and controlling and feuds with Bit’s father Abe. Arcadia is a Utopian dream during Bit’s childhood, but is already beginning to crumble by his adolescence. In adulthood, Bit must reconcile the memories he holds of the loving community of his early years with the outside world that he now is forced to join.
There were many themes in Arcadia, but what I found most interesting was the book’s discussion of the choice between freedom and community. In one scene, the adult Bit muses over the “fragile social contract” that governs both Arcadia and his current home of Manhattan:
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 diving 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 over over the red button and, in 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.
Haven’t we all contemplated that from time to time? The same idea (less eloquent, though) often comes on me when I am approaching a green light. I have to put my trust in the likelihood that the drivers coming in the opposite direction will respect that red means stop and green means go, and that they have red and I have green. Such a basic concept, so many lives riding on everyone accepting it and agreeing together that green means go and red means stop. And that was part of the problem with Arcadia: they lived by their own set of rules, but not everyone accepted or abided by those rules.
And then, Bit and his daughter talking about freedom and community with an elderly Amish woman:
She stands and shrugs. It is lonely, she says. Five years, I was lonely. Then I realized that I was not happy, and would do anything to be taken in and loved. It seems a give-and-take, you know? Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
Why can’t you have both? says Grete, frowning. I think you could have both.
You want both, Glory says, you are destined to fail.
Glory goes on to describe the Amish reaction to Arcadia when it first arose: horrified by the free-living hippies, the Amish gathered together and decided to help the community only to the extent that they would keep them from starving. When Arcadia began to disintegrate – as the Amish knew it would – they would stand back and let the commune fail.
Reasonable, and probably more than most would do anyway. But there are casualties when Arcadia fails: mostly Bit’s peers, the children. They didn’t join Arcadia because they necessarily agreed with its aims and philosophies. They were either brought along when their parents joined, or like Bit they were born into the commune. Bit comes out better than most, but he carries his own wounds from his years in Arcadia. As he grows old, Bit is closest to his old Arcadia friends; while he likes his life in New York he has not truly made friends “on the Outside.” The Arcadian children catapult through life in vastly different directions: they become one-hit-wonders, moguls, Suburbanites, drug addicts. Bit cautiously builds himself a life in New York until family tragedy forces him back to temporarily resume his residence in the overgrown ruins of Arcadia:
He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.
In the end, Arcadia reads like an elegy to idealism. Little Bit never loses it, even as the world changes around him. It’s a beautifully written, sad and sweet book full of heart and a little rebellion. The characters – even the peripheral characters – are three-dimensional and memorable. And Bit himself is heart personified.
Recommended.
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