Matrix

The story of Matrix kept reminding me, strangely, of its fellow National Book Award finalist, Laird Hunt's Zorrie, which also compresses the full scope of a woman's life, cloistered and full of work and longing, into the space of a short, lyrical novel. But Groff's Marie is not a modest farmer in rural Indiana but an ambitious abbess in 12th-century England, who is both a visionary writer (based in that respect on the poet Marie de France, of whose life little is known) and a brilliantly competent administrator, who transforms her visions into a powerful, fortified, all-female institution whose ever-growing prosperity both protects her subjects and endangers them. As a portrait of admirable, ancient power, I was reminded of another superb novel, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.