By Courtney McCreary. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 24)
“Florida in the summer is a slow hot drowning.” So begins “Yport,” the last story in Lauren Groff’s new collection.
In Florida, Groff, the New York Times-bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the short story collection Delicate Edible Birds, delivers a vivid character study. Characters include a homeless TA, a woman whose anxieties have driven away her best friend, a woman caring for her mother, and a young math whiz, but the stories tend to focus on women—mothers, in particular.
The stories are set in various locales—on an island in the middle of the ocean, a hunting cabin in a swamp, a house slammed by hurricane winds, and countries like France and Brazil, but the state of Florida ties them together. Many stories focus on nature, set outside on beaches or swamps, using the Florida backdrop to strengthen the story.
The setting feels both natural and supernatural, perfect for characters fighting internal and external storms. Characters face snakes, panthers, and the lonely, swampy heat of Florida. And then there are the hurricanes. Bad things happen during hurricanes, but these bad things show there is strength in survival.
In an effort to prove herself to her a husband, the mother in “The Midnight Zone” and her two sons are left alone in a hunting camp, without a car, miles from the closest neighbor. The first day goes well, full of fun and adventures for the mother and sons, but that evening she falls from a stool and hits her head on the ground. Groff captures perfectly the quiet, uncertain panic of surviving through the night.
But not every story in the collection feels so grounded in reality. “Dogs Go Wolf” feels very much like a fairy tale. Two sisters are abandoned by first their mother, and then their caretakers, when a storm hits the tiny island where they live. The girls survive together, the older leading the younger, through every obstacle: bad weather, lack of food and water, the swampy Florida heat, wild animals, and the angry dog who hates them, but they refuse to let starve.
Of all the disasters characters face in these stories, loneliness seems to take the greatest toll. In “Ghosts and Empties” a woman explores her neighborhood, escaping from the woman she fears she has become, noting the changes of those in the houses she passes as well as in herself.
The past often bears itself in the shape of lost family members, ghosts appearing to characters alone and disconnected, forcing them to face something they’ve run away from. Jude, the central character in “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” is left behind by his mother and loses his unforgiving, snake-wrangling father to one of the snakes he captured. Jude moves away from the Florida swamp, but returns to grow old in the same home he was raised. He is lost on the lake, and there, sunbattered and dehydrated, sees his father.
In a sort of twisted Christmas Carol, the main character of “Eyewall” is visited by the absent men in her life as she is hunkered down, trying to survive the night during a devastating hurricane. It becomes apparent quickly how deeply each one has affected her.
The stories in this collection are beautiful and wild. Characters are neglected, alone in perilous situations, focused on their pasts and the anxieties of their futures, but Groff tells their stories with an elegant grace.
Courtney McCreary is the Publicity and Promotions manager at the University Press of Mississippi. She lives and writes in Jackson, Mississippi.
Signed first editions of Florida by Lauren Groff are still available at Lemuria.
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