Florida Paperback – May 21, 2019

<img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51JC1V9SVAL.jpg" width=160>[Florida] by I've enjoyed Lauren Groff's novels and was very much looking forward to this collection of short stories.. Let me begin by saying that Groff has done an excellent job of creating the environment of Florida. She has done it so well, in fact, that I know that I will never want to live there (nor likely visit either). Oppressive heat and humidity by day, surprisingly chilly nights, swamp dwellers, sinkholes, Spanish moss, hurricanes, tangled vines, transplanted Northerners, drug dealers, drifters, grifters, illegal immigrants, gators, lizards, mosquitos, and a plethora of snakes (even in the toilets): not my idea of home. No wonder the main character in the final story flies off to France with her two children--and yet she chooses a place almost as unpleasant as she conducts research for a novel about the unpleasant man who lived there, Guy de Maupassant.The stories are, for the most part, female-centric: the protagonists (if we can call them that) are mostly discontented mothers (generally of boys, as another reviewer notes), and there is indeed a sense of sameness about them. Perhaps they are a bit autobiographical (the author herself being a transplant from New England), or perhaps they are based on sketches and notes for another novel. But I think the oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere that Groff creates is intentional; it's the framework on which the collection is built, and Groff's marvelous writing fleshes it out, in all of its bleakness. Who else would look at the sun and see "yellow wool," a perfect metaphor that works on more than one of the senses?So, beautifully crafted, but, yes, bleak. Don't read this if you're feeling rather down; it will only take you deeper. In the bleakest of these bleak stories, a young woman leaves graduate school and her job as an English instructor to live in her car, sneaking into clubs and public libraries to get a wash, eating out of dumpsters, getting kicked off beaches for parking after hours, and just when you think it can't get any worse, it does--again and again. I don't think I've ever felt so depressed after finishing a short story. And I have to credit Groff's writing for moving me that much. Read Florida and appreciate it as art. You'll be carried away--just not quite to the paradise that the Sunshine State portrays in its promotional material.

Some of the stories in this collection are truly brilliant, especially the one describing the increasing force of the hurricane that strikes one of the narrator’s homes. Some elicit a ‘what?’ ‘How’s that again?’ Overall good but surely not genius. Some very funny, very revealing opinions about mothers caring for children (or not), global warming, politics, the tsunami of plastic garbage we insouciantly produce. A few tone-deaf moments but generally very well worth reading.

I think I enjoyed this book, but I would need to read it again to know for sure--hence, there stars. This was the latest assignment for my Wild Women book club. I don't read many short stories, but I've been enjoying them more and more lately.As the title suggests, all of these stories are connected to the state of Florida in some way. Most of the stories also deal with family dynamics of internal struggle. I really got sucked into the woman wandering her neighborhood at night, the boy never understood by the world, a woman haunted by her past and another that can't find her future.Dialogue is sparse (with no quotation marks) and Groff's fluid writing style carries many layers of meaning. A few of the stories were unsettling and most were ambiguous. But it was a good escape from pandemic lockdown. At the very least, I'm not in Florida surrounded by snakes.

A perfect book if you are as confused about Florida as you should be.

I heard Lauren Groff interviewed on a City Arts and Lectures podcast and was so fascinated by her that I felt compelled to read one of her books. Florida is a very unusual book, to say the least. Her writing style and powerful use of language did not disappoint. However, for me, the relentless underpinnings of grief, pain, and dysfunction of her characters, especially of children, made reading this book almost too painful at times, in spite of the eloquence and stunning use of language. By the time I got to “Above and Below” the pain of her character was so intense that I skipped to the end of that story. The language pulled me forward, but the pain shut me down. After listening to the interview, I plan to read Matrix, however.

During a recent visit, Lauren Groff shared that when her husband proposed moving back to his native Florida, she, appalled, made him sign a contract that they would leave in 10 years years. That was more than 12 years ago. In the intervening years, she has come to love the state and all its weirdness, and even gave it the top acknowledgement for this, her excellent book of short stories. She knows she is a short story writer, having entered Amherst as an aspiring poet and having the intelligence to recognize that wasn't the path for her. She admits her forays into novels as an aberration (successful though those sidesteps may be), which explains why her stories are so rich, so immersive, and impossible to read in one gulp. They must be paced out. I've said in other reviews that when collections of short stories are good, they are hard work for a reader since it is like reading an entire shelf of well thought-out books, requiring more effort than say a 300 page novel.What each story has in common here is someone in difficulty, either women or children, usually in danger from forces of nature rather than from another human being. That's what gives these stories their originality -- the unpredictability, impersonality and power behind forces which one cannot control. There is much reference to literature that Groff holds dear (when asked, she responded that she read material she loved multiple times, e.g., she had read the first volume of Proust's Remembrance of Time Past at least 8 times but hadn't progressed to the other volumes), and one story delves into the personality of Guy de Maupassant. A very impressive collection from a more than impressive writer.