Lauren Groff, _Matrix_

 I LIKELY WOULD not have read this had our book club not chosen it for our September meeting, but I was game, given Groff's generally solid critical reputation. I was a little worried, though, when the prose in the opening pages offered several examples of the kind of overcooked writing typical of the cheesier end of historical fiction--pointless adjectives, crude psychologizing, over-explanation. To wit:

"delicate mushrooms poking from the rich soil" (p. 3)

"felt her greatness hot in her blood" (p. 5)

"Eleanor extended her hand, encrusted with rings" (p. 7)

"she felt ebbing out of her the dazzling love that had filled those years" (p. 9)

"the abbess Emme, to whom an internal music had been given as solace for her blindness" (p. 11)

I stuck with it, though, and while the prose did not get a lot better as things went along, Groff did conjure up an interesting character. 

The novel takes the point of view of Marie de France, author of the Lais, a 12th century collection of narrative poems in Old French. Little is known of the author save that she was French and named Marie--not even that much is solidly established, actually--but one intriguing speculation is that she was Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury, the out-of-wedlock daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet and hence half-sister to England's Henry II. Groff takes this idea and runs with it.

Her Marie is somewhat in love with Henry's wife, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, but also in her later years both a visionary and an extremely skillful administrator, somewhat along the lines of Hildegard of Bingen or Gertrude the Great. She turns the abbey into a thriving feminist utopia, materially prosperous, well-protected, and a center of learning. (The Lais get short shrift here, just a few pages early in the novel).

I wondered if the novel was a kind of argument that menopause unleashes women's power. Part I of the novel, about fifty pages, is about Marie's early, unhappy days at the abbey, when she writes the Lais; Part II is mainly about her erotic intrigues in the abbey. Marie hits menopause at the beginning of Part III, which is about 150 pages, and that is when she really comes into her own, transforming the abbey into a powerful community. 

Is menopause a kind of rebirth for women? All that distraction vanished, a clearing of the mind, a claiming of one's power? It seemed that way in Matrix.