A State of the Union and a State of Mind

Florida stories by Lauren Groff.  Riverhead Books.  275 pp. $17.00 *****

I’m stunned by the talent of Lauren Groff.  Some time ago a friend suggested I might check out her work, and thought her novel about modern marriage, Fates and Furies, was a good place to start.  It was good in the sense that it got my attention.  I felt the early part of that novel was overwritten (about her novel Arcadia, Richard Russo said, “It’s not possible to write any better without showing off.”  I felt that in Fates and Furies, at least part of the way, she was showing off[1]), but was amazed by the turns the story took, and the way that, with apparently effortless skill, she told the story of a marriage from both points of view.  I moved on to Matrix, her novel about a twelfth century nun and poet, then figured I’d tackle Arcadia, since Matrix concerned a kind of utopia and I understood Arcadia to feature another such place.  But my bookstore had sold its copy of that novel and only had Florida on hand.  I ordered the novel and figured I would read these stories in the meantime.

It doesn’t follow that a good novelist will write good stories.  Those are separate forms with separate talents, and there aren’t many people adept at both.  But Florida is the work of an expert story writer, quite skilled at the form.  The other thing that fascinates me (I know a little of Groff’s story, what I was able to discover on the Internet) is that Florida is adopted territory for her—she grew up in upstate New York, where Arcadia is set—yet she has made this setting her own.  She knows Florida as if she were a native (I’m not talking about the state I remember from the fifties and sixties, but the overcrowded, over-traveled, climate challenged junky state that exists today.  My mother loved the west coast of Florida, and traveled there every chance she got, but the Naples and Sarasota that exist now are a far cry from what I experienced in my youth[2]).

Groff seems obsessed with storms and natural disasters.  There were horrific storms in Fates and Furies and Matrix; in this book there are several, befitting the climate challenges that have arisen all over the planet.  Groff is superb at describing natural disasters and people dealing with them.  Some of her descriptions took my breath away.

She seems in several stories to be writing about herself, or at least a woman like her, a writer/academic with a husband who does another kind of work and two small children, both sons.  The opening story, “Ghosts and Empties,” is about wandering her somewhat funky neighborhood at night—she and her husband have resisted the temptation of a gated community—just seeing people around her, feeling and resenting the danger that surrounds her as a lone woman, but also feeling for people less fortunate than she.  This story concerns a particular Gainesville neighborhood but also just living in the United States in the twenty-first century.  It is completely her place and completely everywhere.

She’s just as adept at entering other people’s lives.  “Above and Below” concerns a grad student who loses a teaching appointment and suddenly doesn’t have enough to live on.  Her descent into homelessness is terrifying to read but utterly believable.  “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners” portrays of a boy named Jude who “was born in a Cracker-style house at the edge of a swamp that boiled with unnamed species of reptiles,” his father a kind of swamp rat who loved to collect snakes, his mother a trapped housewife who was trying to love her son and have a life of her own.  Groff captures Jude’s whole life in fewer than thirty pages.

“Dogs Go Wolf” is a terrifying story about two little girls living in a shack on the coast with their druggie parents; the parents take off on a vague errand and never return, leaving the girls to fend for themselves.  “The Midnight Zone” concerns another Groff-like narrator is left in a hunting camp with her two boys while her husband goes off on a business emergency (it is her decision to stay; this woman is stubborn).  While making a repair she slips and hits her head, then spends the whole two days trying not to lose consciousness and not to overly alarm the boys, who respond beautifully, though there is only so much they can do.

In all of these stories Florida seems to be a character.  There’s a way in which they could only have taken place there.  And even in the several stories that take place elsewhere, people are based in Florida, fleeing it for one reason or another (often the stifling weather).  One woman heads to “Salvador” in Brazil only to run into a terrifying storm, and an equally terrifying situation, there.

I must admit that this Lauren Groff-type character is the one who interests me most (I’m always trying to get at the person behind the stories, even when she is totally absent).  It is her spirit that hovers over this collection; “Ghosts and Empties” was a perfect opening story.  She is stubbornly who she is: she is the one who resents the dangers in their neighborhood even while she is defying them by walking on hot nights or taking long runs in the early morning.  It was her decision to stay in the hunting camp in “The Midnight Zone” even though there were obvious dangers and her husband might have wished that she leave.  And in the final story, the longest in the collection and perhaps my favorite, “Yport,” she flees the stifling Florida summer by taking her sons to France, hoping to expose them to another culture while researching a writing project about Guy de Maupassant.  This woman always has a lot going on.

I know the perils of heading off with a child for a “great” vacation as a single parent.  You’re trying to do a good thing and it winds up being dreadful.  I also had a thing about Guy de Maupassant when I was young, and read the Steegmuller biography she mentions.  I thought I would become a great writer of stories like Maupassant, also have sex with many women, as he was said to do (in a weird encounter with Frank Harris in My Life and Loves—which Groff seems to have read—Maupassant demonstrates his ability to get erect at will.  Nice work if you can get it).

Groff shatters these notions one by one.  The French countryside is indeed beautiful, but she finds herself taking long climbs up perilous hills on steps that have no guardrail, no place I would want to be with young sons.  Her family is vegetarian and doesn’t want to eat any living thing, so their version of French cuisine becomes monotonous.  Maupassant was a talented writer of stories but also a bully and a whore fucker who wound up dying of syphilis in his early forties, as did his only sibling, a brother; their mother was left to mourn the early death of her two sons, both felled by concupiscence[3].  The scenes in which the schoolboy Maupassant bullied a friend are revolting almost beyond belief, and make me not want to read anything the man wrote ever again.  By the end of the story our protagonist is as exasperated and fed up as we are.  Life’s little ironies.  We try to educate our children and expose them to a superior culture, but they’d rather be back in Gainesville suffering through the heat.

Lauren Groff is 45 years old and loaded with talent.  I don’t greet her at the start of a brilliant career but smack in the middle of it.  She seems equal to the situation.  We sit here waiting for more.

[1] I think that in some ways I’m being unfair to that book, in which Groff was really just letting her talent rip, and that I should read it again.  But I’m not sure I could take it at the moment.

[2] In one of these stories, someone mentions Sarasota as a city in Florida, and another character says, “That doesn’t count.”  I get it.  It’s like saying Asheville is a city in North Carolina.  Not really.  It’s a city in Lalaland.

[3] Were there any nineteenth century French writers who didn’t contract syphilis?  Just asking.