Groff’s fourth novel, Matrix, is something very different indeed: a strange and poetic piece of historical fiction set in a dreamlike abbey, the fictional biography of a 12th-century mystic. Now we have Lauren Groff, author of the celebrated Fates and Furies, a sharp novel of New York life that drew comparisons to Gone Girl and was praised by Barack Obama. More recently, there’s been Christopher Wilson’s Hurdy Gurdy, James Meek’s To Calais, in Ordinary Timeand, in a slightly skewed vision, Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a near-forgotten masterpiece set in a medieval nunnery, while Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose had metafictive fun mixing crime and semiotics. M onasteries and convents make excellent crucibles: closed worlds in which the events of a novel are heightened, their tensions felt more keenly.
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