Marie is a perfect vessel for a writer with robust vision: So little is known about her that Groff can proceed untroubled by questions of historical accuracy. In her new novel, “Matrix,” the work of Marie de France - the 12th-century poet who leavened her traditional Breton lais with a little fairy dust - provides Groff a literary springboard into a past whose features offer a mirror to our own time.
What contemporary fiction writer might be better suited to take advantage of this particular discomfort than Lauren Groff? Perhaps best known for “Fates and Furies,” her vivisection of a marriage, Groff is a heavily allusive writer whose narratives typically carry a freight of sophisticated references. Now that the Middle Ages have come loose from history books and ended up on the front page, it’s beginning to look like the Last Judgment panel from Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”
Not to mention bleached reefs, blazing forests and the aerial Danse Macabre of starved migratory birds falling lifeless from the sky. Or the unrelenting death knell of a plague that summoned the astonishing sight of a field hospital in Central Park, while overburdened mortuaries outsourced the dead to mobile morgue trucks. Maybe it’s the return of children’s crusades, Greta Thunberg’s for the environment, David Hogg’s against gun violence.
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