![]() ![]() It’s a beautiful scene, both because it captures not just the anti-industrial fantasies of its time so powerfully and because it contains within itself the contradictions that so often led to the dissolution of such communities – note that it is the women doing the washing – as well as a reminder in the form of the circled buses, and their echoes of the travels of the Mormons and other groups, of the persistence of the fantasies and dreams that drive such communities. While women wash laundry and sing by a river, a community gathers for the evening, their trucks and buses “circled like bison against the wind”, their leader saluting the sun from the top of the bus at the circle, naked children darting through the trees on the fringes of the camp. The novel opens on a riverbank in upstate New York in 1968. ![]() These dreams – and more particularly their persistence and their cost – are front and centre in Arcadia, American writer Lauren Groff’s second novel, which depicts the foundation, corruption and finally the dissolution and the aftermath of that dissolution of one such community. Although the literature concerned with imaginary utopias is extensive, the list of novels devoted to life in utopian communities is comparatively short, a fact that seems curious when one considers what perfect fictional fodder the slow dying of their dreams makes. ![]()
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