50 pages • 1 hour read
Lauren GroffFates and Furies
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Furies”
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary
Chollie ambushes Mathilde at her pool six months after the death of Lotto.
He says this visit’s purpose is to check on her at the behest of their mutual friend. The only food Mathilde has in the house is the ice cream, due to her apathy toward taking care of herself.
Chollie has actually come over to gloat about the fact that he’s known what type of person Mathilde is all along. Mathilde remarks that he waited twenty-four years too long to say anything, as Lotto is dead. Chollie counters that in fact he was able to get through to Lotto just in time at Natalie’s memorial get-together, where Ariel revealed their shared past. Mathilde asks Chollie why he set out to ruin her and he says because she took the only person close to him in the world and that she didn’t deserve Lotto because she’s not a good person.
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary
After graduation, Mathilde and Lotto pack up their dorm rooms to move into their shared apartment. Aunt Sallie and Rachel arrive and Mathilde meets them for the first time. Lotto is convinced his mother doesn’t love him anymore, but Mathilde knows it has everything to do with the fact that Mathilde is married to Lotto.
At dinner, while Sallie and Lotto reminisce about his promiscuous past, Rachel and Mathilde bond. Mathilde gives Rachel a $10,000 emerald necklace that was a gift from Ariel. It is only then that Mathilde notices that Ariel is sitting at the next table over, watching the dinner play out.
Ariel sends food to the table and Aunt Sallie thinks it’s an admirer from Lotto’s acting days on campus. Lotto, unaware, announces in utter joy that he and Mathilde are married. Ariel leaves the restaurant upon the news. Mathilde feels relief in being “shed of him. For good” (305).
However, Mathilde then returns to Ariel. After trying to adjust to side jobs in order to maintain Lotto’s dreams and their impending bills, Mathilde sucks up her pride and goes to Ariel’s gallery to work as his protégé, much to the chagrin of a very confused Luanne, Ariel’s trusty receptionist. Mathilde promises she will quit if Ariel ever crosses the line by touching her.
When Mathilde is 60 and Ariel is 73, she concedes to a visit with him when she finds out he is dying in a hospital from pancreatic cancer. She allows him his dying wish of holding her hand, and this is the true end of their relationship.
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary
In her newly-resolved quest to take down Chollie for exposing her lie by omission and ending her marriage, Mathilde has her attorney hire a private investigator.
The woman hired is not at all what Mathilde was expecting, having read too many hard-boiled detective fiction classics. The young woman’s got a sizeable dolphin tattooed on her breasts and a sass that masks a watchfulness just below the surface.
The private detective notes her initial findings that Chollie’s original business venture, the “Charles Watson Fund” (310), was a Ponzi scheme. She questions Mathilde’s motives in hiring her (business related or personal vendetta), but takes the case. The investigator flirts with Mathilde throughout the encounter, but it’s nothing that Mathilde can’t handle.
Part 2, Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Mathilde starts to gain back some composure and fight as she seeks revenge on Chollie. It comes to light that aside from upending Antoinette and Chollie’s relationships with Lotto, Mathilde also affected Ariel more than she realized in making herself unavailable to him. Mathilde, with her lack of emotional experience, focused solely on ending things professionally with Ariel, even as she failed to realize he stopped being professional years ago.
After years of learning to live without Lotto, the moment of Mathilde visiting Ariel in his final days shows how much she worked on issues and matured in her old age. Comparatively, during her mourning period after Lotto’s death, Mathilde’s quest of sabotaging Chollie in all areas of his independence shows in how much of dark place she used to be, and how much more healing she still had left to go, in order to beat her co-dependency issues.
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By Lauren Groff
