Old Florida, New Florida, Lauren Groff

Florida
Lauren Groff
Riverhead Books, New York 2018

I am a capricious reader—of Lauren Groff. Her Fates & Furies infuriated me. I read it because it was mentioned in a group review of House Frau by Jill Alexander Essbaum, a good friend of mine. There was at the time a certain “wokeness” of reviewers about women and sex. I know, ridiculous. The idea was that these books should be grouped together because women in them were having sex.

Which didn’t make sense because had not one of the reviewers read Madame Bovary? Maybe they were put together because it was women writing novels about sex. Either way, even the categorization was infuriating.

Fates & Furies went on to be highly lauded: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A FINALIST FOR THE 2015 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

NPR MORNING EDITION BOOK CLUB PICK

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, TIME, THE SEATTLE TIMES, MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE, SLATE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, KIRKUS, AND MANY MORE

You can find my review here: https://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2015/02/day-10-all-way-to-key-west.html

Yet, I’m not easily thrown or known to give up. I’d been hearing good things about her latest short story collection, Florida, last fall—especially as hurricane season swung into action. I read an excerpt and heard something on NPR as Hurricane Michael was about to dash the Florida coast. As I read the unlinked stories I thought about my 2015 bike trip from Jacksonville to Key West. And, perhaps, because this Chicago winter has been so brutal, I longed to go back.

Thus, I began a reader’s journey through Lauren Groff’s Florida.

I was drawn in by the opening story “Ghosts and Empires,” where Old Florida is a character, a ghost. I especially loved the “I” protagonist, a woman not sure how to be emotionally available to a world that seems to be going to shit. Echos of this theme show up in “Yport.” A woman in self-doubt, contained by all that contains her. I could easily picture myself thinking a month alone with just my children sounded freeing—instead of in reality claustrophobic and exhausting, a bit lonely after a while. I’m always thinking travel will soothe my restlessness, solve all my problems with the hostile politics of America.

Most of these stories are melancholic. Flashes of Old Florida, the horrors of contemporary life in the subtropics of Florida, the dread of snakes, bugs, university life. “At the Rounded Earth’s Imagined Corners” we read the story of a man, a life in one sitting as seen through the lens of nostalgia.

Uncannily, Groff follows a prescription first laid out for me by Rebecca Makkai of the recent The Great Believers fame. She taught a class at OCWW where she lectured on the idea of combining 2 or 3 disparate things. Often something happens and we think, I should write about that. But, of course, we go on and never do it. Then 9 or 10 more things happen, and we continue to think, I should write about that. Until finally we jumble them all up into one story where a lot of weird things happen. It makes for an interesting read.

Groff does that in Florida, particularly in “Snake Stories.” Random stories about snakes, the fear of snakes, and family.

My favorite was “Above and Below” about a homeless woman. Probably all of us have passed a homeless person and thought if not for the grace of God that could have been me. We are, most of us, only a dollar or two separated from a complete financial breakdown, only a catastrophe away from ruin. Add on top of that family pathology and a smidgen of depression or bi-polar and we have a recipe for the slow slide into living in a tent in the woods and eating out of Dumpsters. Right now—the cries of humanity overwhelm us. They are not in the far years of the past, engulfed in Holocaust and world war, but in the descent or de-evolution of mankind into climate change, barbaric regimes inured to their own people, gun violence, epidemic suicide, on and on. We are slowly unraveling—except for some miracle that reminds of new life and the hope for creation. There have been times, such as when traveling in Florida on my bike where I thought I might veer off, make a sudden turn and lose myself and never go home. In fact, while camping one night in mangroves at a state park there was a woman in the spot next to me sleeping in her car with an odd assortment of stuff. I had the feeling, and overheard a phone call, that she had indeed dropped out. Her daughter was pissed. People needed her to come back, but she was refusing.

All at once we are no longer from above and below the earth, somewhere in between.