"Arcadia," by Lauren Groff - NYTimes.com Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn Lauren Groff's second novel, "Arcadia," arrives bearing enthusiastic blurbs from Kate Walbert and Richard Russo (who claims "it's not possible to write any better without showing off"). But readers doomed to miss their subway stops will wish the cover also included a warning: "This novel will swallow you whole." "Arcadia" centers on Bit Stone, the kindhearted only child of Hannah and Abe Stone, two of the finest freaky parents in recent literary memory, who raise him in the western New York commune they helped found in the 1970s. In Arcadia, they intended to establish a home "outside the evil of commerce" and "a beacon to light up the world." This experiment lasts until Bit is 14. The novel then abruptly leaps to post-9/11 New York City, where the Stones fled when Arcadia failed them. By now Bit is a grown man with a child of his own and a job teaching "the lost art of the darkroom" in the photography department at a local university. Having "barely survived" his transition from the commune all those years ago, he's now fully adjusted to city life - although he still feels professionally numb and emotionally crippled. Then Groff skips again, to the year 2018 or so. Global warming has ravaged the planet, and a deadly pandemic is wiping out the "newborns and the old and the sick." But when an emergency calls Bit back to Arcadia, it offers him an unexpected chance to heal. Groff connects the novel's utopian past to its dystopian future through Bit's cleareyed optimism: the sensitive boy who believes "people are good and want to be good" becomes the bruised man who still finds "the possibility of beauty" in life. The book's real treat, though, is Groff's writing. As in her first novel, "The Monsters of Templeton," Groff's sentences are lush and visual. Here she is on the opening page, for instance, describing laundry day at the commune: "The women washed clothes and linens in the frigid river, beating wet fabric against the rocks. In the last light, shadows grew from their knees and the current sparked with suds. Her descriptions of the young Bit, meanwhile, uncannily illuminate the hidden world of children. One winter morning, he rises early and eats an icicle. "All day," Groff writes, "the secret icicle sits inside him, his own thing, a blade of cold, and it makes Bit feel brave to think of it." Groff also brilliantly captures the rise and fall of Arcadia. Early on, she describes the rundown mansion on the property, awaiting its renovation: "In the wind, the tarps over the rotted roof suck against the beams and blow out, a beast's panting belly." Years later, as the residents begin to depart, "Arcadia feels like a book with the pages ripped out, the cover loose in Bit's hands." One morning, Bit's father holds a tutorial on Milton for some of Arcadia's young boys. "The mind is its own place," he tells them, "and in itself can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." Bit's ability to survive his dizzying fall from the mock Eden of his youth into our broken world is a testament to that idea. "Arcadia" reminds us that "when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves." John Wilwol's reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The San Francisco Chronicle.