Florida by Lauren Groff

This collection of short stories is the full package – skillful use of words, structure that maintains momentum, insightful and moving. The few missteps - where clarity is sacrificed to poetic turns of phrase - are negligible.

I love it when I find evidence that I will never run out of new books to be awed by in this life. Groff masterfully builds narrative tension around a series of predicaments, often arising from the character’s residence in the state of Florida.

Groff’s range is impressive, her view of the human condition broad – in some stories, the tension arises because the risk of death by alligator, panther, snake and sinkhole is pervasive as the humid Florida air. She captures the haphazard, melancholy way that a life unfolds when the protagonist has financial security, until hurricane force winds smash the windows out. In other stories, particularly “Above and Below,” she describes the chaotic, terrifying insecurity of a life without money, how disturbingly thin the barrier is between so many Americans and complete indigence.

Between these stories are brief windows into the inner thoughts of a self-deprecating, middle-class wife and mother who claims, charmingly enough, to have fallen in love with the early naturalist William Bartram. Bartram explored Florida and recorded its flora and fauna in 1774. “Florida, Bartram’s ghost has been trying to tell her all along, is erotic.”

Like hurricanes, like alligators and snakes hiding in lagoons, the disasters of humanity – abandonment, poverty, violence - lurk in dark corners threatening assault at any moment. The structures society has built to defend against tragedy are porous and unreliable at best.

Somehow this is the first work by Lauren Groff I have ever read, aside from a short story in the New Yorker. It blew me away. Sometimes her word choice alone is an act of dazzling genius (when describing a hurricane - “the air felt poached”). I can’t wait to check out her novels.