Arcadia

Author: Lauren Groff

Rating: ⭐ 4/5

Date Read: 2013/01/19

Pages: 291

This book probably deserves three and a half stars, but it did prompt me to listen to a soundtrack of hippie music as I read. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, The Grateful Dead’s American Beauty. For that, it gets bumped up to four stars.

Arcadia chronicles the life of Bit, “the littlest bit of a hippie,” from his birth in Arcadia, the commune where he lives until he turns 14, to his middle age. Bit has always been small (maybe because he’s commune was fed a vegan diet, and the poor thing had to grow up on soy egg replicas), and his smallness allows him to observe the world without notice. Like Bit, Lauren Groff allows her readers to glimpse his strange world, without enough agency to actually effect change. As you may expect, the commune cannot survive forever; indeed, Groff foreshadows its demise from the first chapter of the book.

Groff takes the views of her hippie characters seriously, but she does not venerate their “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together” lifestyle. It’s easy to see the folly of the radical right: those who live in fear of knowledge, who believe that the only way to peace is through gun ownership. I find it more difficult to envision the extremes of my heathen, organic, liberal existence. Reading Arcadia felt a bit like holding up a fun-house mirror to my life. Certainly, if a situation arose in which an interlocutor expressed an admiration for Ayn Rand (which happens to Bit, in the latter half of the book), I would promptly extricate myself from the situation (likely, not gracefully). Perhaps there is a version of me that would run off to join a subsistence farming co-op (or, at the very least, a locavore co-op in the upper Haight). Arcadia makes me wonder whether I could give up everything to live off the earth, and If I even think that’s a bad thing.