Fates and Furies

The love story of Lotto and Mathilde’s origins backtracks all the way to the love story of Lotto’s parents. His beautiful mother, Antoinette, follows her dreams of stardom to Florida, but soon settles for a failed love life as an aging aquarium mermaid. By luck, she meets a young runaway named Sallie who introduces Antoinette to her rich-though-aloof manufacturing brother, Gawain. Gawain is the founder of the Hamlin Springs water bottling empire and amasses a fortune. He and Antoinette fall into a convenient but honest love. Not ten months after they get married, their son, Lancelot, or Lotto, is born.

Lotto enjoys a carefree upbringing of wealth and support from his parents and aunt until witnessing the death of his father right before the birth of his baby sister, Rachel. The trauma sends him into a downward spiral for the summer; he acts out after meeting a trio of punks at the beach. Police catch the group and charge them with arson. Lotto is sent to a New Hampshire prep school to reform his ways.

Lotto’s awkward looks don’t aid in his adjustment to social life as a fish out of water. He begins to find a niche for himself again as the school’s most talented play actor until he witnesses tragedy once again, with Lotto finding the corpse of another bullied boy after the boy has hanged himself in a closet.

The dean of the school molests Lotto. This, coupled with the arrival of one of the punks, Chollie, announcing Gwennie’s death causes Lotto to withdraw even more into himself.

Samuel, the cox on Lotto’s rowing team, takes pity on the boy and invites him to his beach house for the summer. After the introduction by Samuel’s mother to facial soap, Lotto grows into his looks. This factor allows him to become an undiscriminating nymphomaniac in an “era of women” (33).

Lotto and Samuel end up becoming best friends and college roommates at Vassar. Lotto first lays eyes on Mathilde at a bacchanalian cast party after starring in the campus production of Hamlet. He proposes to her on the spot and she says yes.

Lotto and Mathilde settle into married life in a one-bedroom basement apartment in the West Village. The years are chronicled through parties and dinners, and their friend group slowly whittles down to the essential, core group of Chollie, Samuel, Susannah, Arnie, and Danica.

Lotto does not live up to his early potential as an actor due to his lack of ambition and acne scars. Yet against all odds, and their financial strain, Mathilde and Lotto remain together. The fact that they stay together is much to the chagrin of Danica, whom makes a running bet with Chollie that Lotto and Mathilde will divorce. Chollie cashes in her debt for a date on New Year’s Eve.

At the prodding of Mathilde and the promise of a new year, Lotto decides to change course and begins playwrighting after six years of failing to progress as an actor in New York City.