Finding tension in Florida
Lauren Groff takes inspiration from Sunshine State in latest release
I read American writer Lauren Groff’s story “Dogs Go Wolf” when it first appeared in the New Yorker, and remember the deep sense of unease it provoked — a heart-in-mouth feeling that lingered well after I had put the magazine down.
In the story, two young sisters abandoned on a remote Florida island by unscrupulous criminals manage to eke out an existence both meagre and fantastical.
The sense of foreboding in the story is powerful not only because the girls’ situation is ripe with danger, but also because they are only intermittently aware of the precariousness of their predicament.
This same tension permeates Groff’s new collection Florida (“Dogs Go Wolf” is included therein), the author’s first book since her critically acclaimed, Obama-approved 2015 novel Fates and Furies.
The stories are set in Florida itself or haunted by the spirit of the Floridian landscape where “the wedges of pelicans ghost overhead” and “feral cats dart underfoot, bird of paradise flowers poke out of the shadows.” Alligators, panthers, snakes and the state’s often vicious, climate-change-induced weather butt up against the wilderness that lives inside of people: their surging-strong emotions and the inevitable tide of their realizations.
This creates a compelling meld of the metaphysical and the physical, with Groff’s keen eye infusing everyday particulars with a sense of peculiar magic that evokes both the smallness and urgency of our concerns.
Groff’s characters — mainly women — are thoughtful, searching and frequently unsettled, but the stories never feel weighted down by their yearning or sense of melancholy. Instead, her people find meaning and odd, ballooning respite in moments of impending doom — an encounter with a menacing stranger or the ghost of an ex-lover in the midst of a hurricane, a head injury sustained in a remote swampland cabin.
In this final scenario, brought to life in “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” a mother is stranded with her sons in a hunting camp when she falls and hits her head and must reckon with the options. “Safety was twenty miles away and there was a panther between us and there, but also possibly terrible men, sinkholes, alligators, the end of the world.”
Groff’s women and unsentimental, often eerily prescient children — the most vulnerable among us — speak to a larger human vulnerability and our instinct to persist in the face of near-certain disaster.
This collection is mesmerizing storytelling from a consummate writer with insight and vision to spare.