Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > Matrix

There are several definitions of "matrix," but the one central to this novel is an old one, meaning a kind of mother, from matr- and -trix, and once I figured that out I stopped asking the question I'd had since I first heard that it was a book about 12th century nuns where I could not for the life of me figure out what a mathematical word like this had to do in the title. Anyway, if you are a weirdo like me, I have solved your problem.

This is a novel about 12th century nuns, the prose holds our characters at quite a distance, and it takes place over several decades without one overarching plot line. All of these things are reasons I should not like this novel, they are not my particular cup of tea, and yet I still liked this quite a lot. Our protagonist, Marie, wins you over early on and you get to have the complicated relationship with her you get in very good novels. Marie is stubborn, proud, and smart. She is a woman in a society where there is no place for smart women, and she is too young to recognize how very lucky she is to be shipped off to be prioress of an abbey, where she will have some stability and a little power.

Eventually Marie comes to understand just how much she can accomplish because she is in a place entirely cut off from most of society, a place where the rules of men do not really apply. In that sense this book is a little bit of a feminist utopia. Not only does Marie find ways to turn the struggling abbey into a stable one, but over time she understands that she is able to make it something unique. She has several visions that assist her in this task, and I suspect some readers will be frustrated by them as a device, but I liked them quite a lot. It doesn't matter to me if they are real religious experiences or dreams based on her own desires, given how deeply the abbey becomes a part of her life it is the same either way.

There is also, unsurprisingly, a lot of queerness in this novel. Happily Groff does not leave it as subtext but makes it actual text on a regular basis. I do not miss the days when all queerness was subtext, y'all.

This is pretty ambitious, even for Groff who is often ambitious, and I was surprised by how much it won me over. I did use my kindle's definition/wikipedia function often as I was unfamiliar with some of the specific terms used in an abbey or used at the time (glad there are archaic definitions listed because they were generally the right ones!) but you will be fine even without them, the book eases you in and context is usually quite clear. It's based on real people and it certainly feels like you get a glimpse into a time that is rarely depicted so clearly in fiction.