I finally abandoned this with only sixty pages to go. Abandoned it without learning the answer to the central question the book asks – who was my father? Because I realised I just couldn’t care. And because I was unable to distinguish most of the many characters from each other despite spending 400 pages with them so it didn’t matter who the father was.

Family trees are fascinating. I love that programme Who do you think you are? We’d all like to know much more about our ancestors. To discover the long succession of complex twists of fate that enabled us to finally get born. To find out who her father is Willie Upton, the narrator, will trace her family history back to the founding fathers of the town she was born in.

The novel begins with a great sentence – “The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the 50 foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.” However, the only really significant purpose of this monster in the novel is to provide that eye-catching first line. There’s a ghost which is equally dramatic as possibility and pointless as a device. In fact, she throws in everything except the kitchen sink. There’s so much going on in this novel that it began to simply induce a feeling of exhaustion.

This was pure whimsy and over-exuberance from the word go. The premise of the entire novel is whimsical. A mother tells her daughter she does know who her father is despite claiming throughout her life that she didn’t but isn’t going to tell her who it is; she wants her daughter to research the conundrum. What we then get are a series of preposterous documents, testaments, portraits – a kind of dream succession of genealogical artefacts that explain every ancestor in his or her own words. Groff here tries her hand at David Mitchell style ventriloquism and fails miserably. All her characters, no matter what century or class or ethnicity they belong to speak in the same exuberant whimsical voice. They soon begin to blur into each other. Eventually I felt the whimsy employed was in large part to disguise the lack of artistry of this overly exuberant novel. It felt like the novel a precocious twelve year old girl with too much mental energy might write.

I think this was too ambitious for a first novel. It's motored by youthful exuberance rather than mental rigour. I found myself wondering if she wasn't under the spell of Krauss and Foer and David Mitchell before writing this. They were all the rage back then. I got the sense of a young writer imitating these writers in a struggle to find her own voice. And for me neither the quirkiness of Krauss/Foer nor the symphonic ventriloquism of Mitchell suits her. In Arcadia she goes back to basics. Straightforward storytelling without any post modernism pretence and I think this is the form that most suits her gift. For me, she’s not really an innovative writer. At least not yet. Her principle gift is she can write so well.

In conclusion, all I can say is thank heavens Groff gave up fancying herself as a comedian when she wrote her next two novels.