Pandemics recur in her stories, as do natural landscapes ravaged by climate change, as do women who are quietly incandescent with rage. There were no, like, humanoid forms in the sky.” Still, throughout Groff’s career, her novels have been a good few beats ahead of the most pressing issues of the moment.

“It was a very 21st-century vision,” she said dryly. When Groff detailed the origins of Matrix, her new novel, I joked that it sounded like she’d had a vision. The temptation with writers who see the world clearly is to attribute some kind of supernatural sight to them when their real gift is rigorous attentiveness to humanity. Sitting in the audience, Groff could feel the energy reverberating between the past and the present, “almost like a tuning fork,” she told me later.

But something about the lecture, by the academic Katie Bugyis on the 12th-century poet Marie de France, caught her imagination, and suddenly she saw the scope of an idea laying itself out before her, striking and luminous in its framework. She usually has a dozen or so different concepts in different stages of fruition orbiting within the solar system of her mind. T hree years after the release of her novel Fates and Furies-a literary bisection of marriage and privilege that was praised variously by President Barack Obama and Amazon (yes, Amazon) as the best book of 2015-Lauren Groff was sitting in a lecture theater at Harvard University, thinking about medieval nuns.

Matrix groff novel