Matrix by Lauren Groff

An ambitious novel, Matrix is about an ambitious woman, Marie. Though Groff's Marie is highly fictionalized, she draws inspiration and intention from real historical figure, Marie de France, about whom we know very little — including her real name or origin. Much has been speculated about the real Marie — and it is from these bare bones of Marie de France that Groff constructs her main character.

Born into the royal court, an unclaimed illegitimate half-sister of King Henry II of England, Marie has been sent away to live at a derelict English abbey. She is too strikingly tall and too unattractive to be married off and continue her privileged life. So, Henry's queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, has arranged for a new life for seventeen-year-old Marie. Plus, with even a small claim to the throne with her Plantagenet blood, she remains a threat to the crown.

"Her faith had twisted very early in her childhood; it would slowly grow ever more bent into its geometry until it was its own angular, majestic thing."

But Marie has never been religious, despite having joined her mother and sisters in the Crusades as a child, and she is bereft as she arrives to the abbey, particularly leaving behind Eleanor, with whom she is in love. Here Groff establishes a main character who we know to be cast out of the royal court and into a life for which she was not raised — a life, by reputation, of hard work, prayer, and isolation. Even in this sentence early in the book, we are promised that Marie's life will grow to be one of majesty yet outside of royalty.

Here at seventeen, Groff chooses for Marie to write the most important piece of the legend of the real Marie de France. She is missing Eleanor, missing her previous life, and in a fit of inspiration brought on by all these feelings and other legends and tales, she pens her Breton lais – the main source from which the real Marie de France is known. She addresses them to King Henry II, in hopes of making Eleanor jealous, and in essentials they disappear from her life. But in the readers' minds they become a star in the history of women's literature. I was dismayed that her writings would be delivered in so small a way and then vanish from the novel about this woman.

The giant gap in this work for me starts here — to dismiss the thing for which this woman is even a known person and shove it to the side while an entirely different story is created seems pointless and a disservice to the real woman. Baffling. Though Groff does show Marie to be intelligent, passionate, and a fine leader with great feeling, I still am remiss that she chose to skate right past the reason this woman is even known in history.

Groff pours a good dose of that passion and feeling into her writing, sometimes too much. Her prose leans purple, placing so many moments — the mundane, a literal battle on horseback, the room's decoration, her spiritual or religious visions, a sexual encounter, or her first menopausal hot flash — onto the same playing field. It's an odd intention — to give everything the same weight. And it is a strange move coupled with the choice of offering the whole of the book in present tense. It brings back to my mind a quote from Philip Pullman, "If every sound you emit is a scream, a scream has no expressive value." Here Pullman is directly addressing the uptick of present tense in books (from an article in The Guardian, 2010), but I find it useful when speaking about Groff's overwrought structure alongside present tense.

I think whenever you play around with real historical people in long-gone time periods you run the risk of the story feeling stale and unknowable, and presumably the present tense is meant to counter this in some way. But this plodding on and on in an occasionally anachronistic fashion (some purposeful and some seemingly accidental), and pairing nigh on unrecognizable medieval words with fairly modern choices, left an incredibly uneven pace and slowed the narrative down tremendously. Some medieval representations from Groff are far too predictable, but some are born of misinterpretations of this era in later centuries, and I think more could've been done to make connections and contrasts to the era in which we live now.

In fact, the entirety of the book felt like a prologue — as if the action or conflict would be revealed soon. However, nothing ever comes of this climbing build, and any small issue Marie meets is resolved quickly and efficiently. Additionally, Groff has written Marie to be potentially the ugliest, tallest, and least-likely-to-wed Mary Sue ever. She can do no wrong, except for being ugly and big-boned, something Groff reminds us of constantly. Because of a few years in which she ran the estate following the death of her mother, she is able to come in to the run-down abbey and not only turn it right sides, but make it profitable, successful, and plentiful for supporting the nuns. (I think she was needed on Downton Abbey in the years following the Great War.) But Groff paints in broad, thick strokes and nothing is given in detail that she can't turn flowery — Marie just wishes things to be done and so they come to pass.

And come to pass they do. How did these completely incompetent and yet completely capable nuns even survive before Marie was sent to them? No one knows. But Marie has saved them — and Groff still skims over this area. Almost all the events and characters depicted are given up more as abstractions than reality. Much of that is due to the distance created by the narrator of the novel, a faraway voice who is not Marie. Years will pass often in the breadth of a page. For instance, within nine pages, Marie goes from thirty-five to forty-five years old.

*"They are forty nuns now. Marie is thirty-five. She has been eighteen years a prioress."

"Marie is forty-five. There are ninety-six nuns, twelve child oblates, all skilled. The abbey is rich."

Nor is this narrator limited to only Marie's understanding — and as the voice describes from far above and sometimes from in the future, often beyond Marie's own lifetime, Groff creates a wide chasm that made it difficult to know Marie's inner workings. Even the dialogue is presented through Marie as a conduit, but not Marie herself...spoken words are random and inserted along with the rest of the text and often in a strange third-person account rather than indicating someone is actively speaking. Another strange choice to pair with a present-tense narrative.

The other part of the giant gap I found in the novel comes from many of the sexual encounters Marie is a part of. Groff's Marie is most probably a lesbian, but Groff approaches sex as a strange and separate component of Marie's life. But many of the sexual scenes in the book are on par with Marie being sexually assaulted. From the infirmary nun's cunnilingus performed with no consent (though this is not presented as a sexual act to Marie after Nest is finished, but a historically accurate understanding of the body's humors — how much truth that is from Nest's understanding is left up to interpretation), to Marie half awake and half dreaming realizing there is actually another person who has crept into her bed and kissing and touching her, so many of Marie's sexual encounters felt as this was the one area where Marie lacked any agency or self-awareness and was preyed upon by someone exhibiting predatory behavior.

One thing Groff does get exactly right is the complete and utter absence of men. Any male person who needs to be mentioned is only spoken of and not allowed in the scene. They are shoved to the sides of the book, and not only is it barely noticeable, but this is a key element for the hidden success Groff's Marie de France demonstrates.

Audiobook, as narrated by Adjoa Andoh: With the strange mixing of the medieval and the modern, I'm glad I had someone there to handle the pronunciation because not many dictionaries even hold a definition for many of these old words, much less how to say them. Andoh did a great job. Many of the choices within the novel made by Groff proved to be a problem even for this skilled narrator. Whenever the non-dialogue dialogue popped up in a paragraph, even Andoh had trouble switching voices for different characters and remembering who was saying what, since in actuality no one was actively saying anything. But I loved her voice — the depth and the tone was wonderfully well suited to this era and this woman.