Matrix

Matrix is Lauren Groff's 2021 fifth novel, the National Book Award finalist and the structural pivot from her contemporary Florida-set catalog (Florida 2018, Fates and Furies 2015) into medieval historical fiction. The structural premise is Marie de France, the actual twelfth-century Anglo-Norman poet whose surviving Lais are some of the canonical pre-Chaucerian Anglo-Norman literary texts, who in Groff's reimagining is sent at seventeen by Eleanor of Aquitaine as prioress to a destitute Benedictine abbey on the English coast. Across the next sixty years (the novel runs from approximately 1158 through Marie's death in approximately 1218), Marie transforms the abbey from a starving twelve-nun community into the wealthiest religious-and-economic community in twelfth-century England - building a labyrinth around the abbey to keep men out, instituting a radical communal-property regime, and producing the broader female-centered intentional community that the entire novel structurally argues for.

Groff's structural method is the patient close-third-person Marie narration across the sixty-year tenure, with the broader twelfth-century European political-and-religious-and-economic-historical material providing the structural setting that the contemporary American literary fiction tradition on medieval religious life has not historically committed to at this depth. The Eleanor of Aquitaine cameo chapters across the novel carry the structural emotional weight; the broader nun-and-abbess ensemble (Goda the broody hen, Wulfhild the strong-willed cellaress, the broader Benedictine sisterhood across the sixty-year arc) is rendered with the kind of patient sociological texture that medieval-historical fiction has not always committed to. The novel's structural argument (about how the operational mechanics of medieval female religious-and-economic intentional community produced a specific kind of operational power that the broader medieval-historical tradition has historically obscured) is made through the texture of the day-to-day abbey chapters rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the structural Groff pivot into medieval historical fiction, and for fans of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, and contemporary literary historical fiction. The Adjoa Andoh audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.