Florida

By Lauren Groff

Riverhead, 275 pp.

By Robert Allen Papinchak

Lauren Groff, the well-regarded novelist best known for the bestselling Fates and Furies, has lived in Florida for more than twelve years. She sees her adoptive state as more than a mere peninsula dangling off the southeastern coast of the United States.  For her, it is a place that is teeming with life – of all kinds.

A native New Yorker and frequent resident of New Hampshire, Groff contrasts the Sunshine State’s insufferable heat and moisture with huddling in the dark against the cold of the frigid northeast. Living in a “termite riddled” house built in 1904, she often confronts “snakes, sinkholes, and alligators,” creatures and cavities she occasionally incorporates into her fictions.

For Groff, Florida is a “fractured and contradictory place,” a locale that is “ultimately unknowable.”  It is also the backdrop, and a central figure, in the 11 character-driven short stories that make up her latest electrifying collection, which not incidentally bears the name Florida.

The “incredible ambivalence” Groff bears towards the state is evident in her depiction of the characters in the stories, all of which have been previously published. Five have appeared in the New Yorker. Others, in magazines and journals including Esquire, Granta, Tin House, American Short Fiction, Five Points, and Subtropic.

As Groff  sees it, Florida is a state of mind where “everything seems a little bit dangerous in an interesting way.” It has a “profound emotional effect on people.”

That danger and that effect are apparent in Groff’s opening story, “Ghosts and Empties.” In order to ward off primal screaming, an unnamed restless narrator laces up her running shoes and goes out “into the twilit streets for a walk.”  That walk, which functions as a form of self-medication, provides glimpses into her neighborhood with overwhelming discoveries about other lives.

In blindingly bright prose, Groff’s wandering narrator sees a “tremendously fat boy” who works out on a treadmill and in a few months becomes a “slender man with pectoral rosebuds on his chest.” Three nuns live in a “mostly windowless place” until one dies and the remaining nuns “must decamp.” They are like a pair of black swans on a nearby pond, “pre-feathered in mourning.”

The narrator also spots a “muttering homeless lady,” a man who “hisses nasties as he stands under the light outside a bodega,” and a therapist who sits at a desk that looks like a “rotting galleon.”

Each of these persons is a stranger to the narrator but during her habitual walks she begins to see them as people. Her restlessness leads to revelations, to an understanding of the overwhelmingly fleeting nature of life.

An avatar or recurring version of this same distressed character seems to appear later in several other stories in the group, most notably in “The Midnight Zone,” “Flower Hunters,” and, in the longest story, “Yport.”

In “The Midnight Zone,” the rebelliousness of what appears to be an “incompetent woman” is tested in an “old hunting camp shipwrecked in twenty miles of scrub.” The narrator is left there with her two small boys. The screens at night “pulsed with the tender bellies of lizards.”  She is also certain that a panther “sliding through the trees” is stalking her. When she falls and injures herself, she is concerned for the safety of her children. There is no landline, but there is the possibility of “sinkholes, alligators, the end of the world.” And there is always that panther stalking her, perhaps as her disassociated self.

On a rainy (there are lots of rainstorms in these stories) Hallowe’en night in “Flower Hunters,” the mother of two boys is left alone to hand out candy to the witches and superheroes who come to her door. She ruminates over the words of a dead Quaker naturalist, wondering why people seem to need to take breaks from her. As the storm outside strengthens, she imagines a sinkhole opening up, not realizing that it is the sinkhole of her life that is most threatening.

In “Yport,” the longest and last story, a mother goes to France in August with her two sons (ages four and six) to do research on Guy du Maupassant. She is trying to escape the “[d]read and heat,” the “slow hot drowning” of Florida’s humidity which “grows spots on her skin, pink where she is pale, pale where she is tan.”  What she discovers in the small fishing village, “all silex and brick and stone streets and hills,” is that she will drink a lot of wine and learn that she is not that fond of du Maupassant nor of her life in which she is “scared of everything.” As a worrisome mother, she is most frightened for her sons’ futures in a world now “full of beauty” but “nearing the midnight of humanity” and “the last terrible flash of beauty before the long darkness.” She envisions a great meteor striking the earth, perhaps creating the largest sinkhole of them all.

Several other stories deserve attention. Like “Yport,” some of them take place outside of Florida yet the characters feel its searing influence.

Once again in France, “For the God of Love, For the Love of God,” the main character has left Florida’s “soul-sucking heat” for the “history, old linen and crystal” of a “stone house down a gully of grapevines.”  What she can’t leave is a “house of conflict,” bringing with her the turmoil from her past, feeling the bad fortune of seeing a raptor killed as if it “signifies the end of days.” Everyone around her seems to be “teetering on the precipice,” regretting abandoned chances.

In “Salvador,” another storm ravages as a character drops into “that viscous pool of years in her later thirties,” a time when she feels her “beauty slowly departing from her.” In the erotically charged narrative, she takes up with “drunk boys half her age” until a shopkeeper she has ignored rescues her.

The narrator of “Eyewall” encounters an all-out hurricane and sits in a tub while recalling the damaging memories of a life “scattered into three counties” as the house around her “wheezed like a bagpipe.” At the end, she recognizes that “houses contain us” but wonders “what we contain.”

The house in “Dogs Go Wolf” is straight out of a fairy tale. Domestic drama, as it did in “The Midnight Zone,” threatens to destroy the lives of two little girls—ages four and seven—abandoned by their mother in a cabin on an island as another “wild storm” surges outside. It is as though they are “made out of air…balloon[s] skidding over the ground.” Reduced to eating cherry ChapStick they eventually forage for food, dropping pebbles along a path. Once looking like “ghost girls in clown make-up and floral sacks,” they creep out of the “dark forest,” their lives eventually moving from “terrible to bearable to better.”

All of the stories in Florida are unforgettable. They stick to your brain like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth. Each demands to be savored. Each can be reread and become more rewarding. Some are the stuff of nightmares, some more real than others. As the state that engendered them is “shifty and constantly contradicts itself,” the characters and the reader discover how it illuminates the shifting demands of life. Groff has found the perfect state of mind for her restless natives.

Robert Allen Papinchak, a former university English professor, has reviewed fiction for newspapers, magazines, and journals including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Seattle Times, USA Today, People, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Strand Magazine, Mystery Scene, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and others. His short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received a Story award. He is the author of Sherwood Anderson:  A Study of the Short Fiction.

Robert Allen Papinchak, a former university English professor, has reviewed fiction for newspapers, magazines, and journals including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Seattle Times, USA Today, People, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Strand Magazine, Mystery Scene, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and others. His short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received a Story award. He is the author of Sherwood Anderson:  A Study of the Short Fiction.