Groff's 'Florida' paints cloudy pictures of Sunshine State

FLORIDA

Author: Lauren Groff

Riverhead Books, 288 pages, $27

For any universities out there are hoping to monetize the zeitgeist, here’s an idea for a brand-new discipline: the Department of Dread. Administrators can save on hiring costs by appointing the one person in America qualified to serve all the roles herself: chair, professor, adjunct and student. She’s Lauren Groff, author of the new short-story collection “Florida,” and she’s earned her Ph.D in Fear. Not the horror-movie kind, but the real-world-2018 kind that slithers up so gradually you don’t notice anything until it has wrapped itself around your chest and you can’t even breathe.

Speaking of snakes, all of the stories in this volume take place in Florida or feature characters whose Florida experience has shaped their destiny. But even in the tales that take place far from the Sunshine State, its climate — the weather, yes, but more significantly the moral and cultural environment — cling to each of the narrators like a shadow.

The first story, "Ghosts and Empties," sets the tone that permeates the rest of the book. Like most of Groff’s narrators, the woman at the center of this piece is unnamed. But she’s so self-aware-bordering-on-paralyzingly-self-conscious that we have a clear sense of who she is from the first line: “I have somehow become a woman who yells, and because I do not want to be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after dinner.” Every evening she leaves her two young sons to her husband, “a man who does not yell,” and walks — sometimes all night — through her “imperfectly safe” northern Florida town.

Lest we assume she’s metaphorically running from her problems, her nighttime observations serve only to deepen her sense that all is amiss. Even the “pleasant smell like campfires in the air” tip her off that “the old turpentine-pine forests that ring the city must be on fire,” and later she discovers it was even worse than she thought: “a controlled burn over the acres where dozens of the homeless have been living in a tent city.”

There’s almost no respite from the barrage of badness infiltrating this narrator’s inner news feed, or those of the characters featured in the stories that follow. But there’s also no sense that any of them are exaggerating, or making the world seem worse than it actually is. Their observations echo exactly what we readers see in newspaper headlines about climate change or take in during a drive through an unevenly-gentrifying urban neighborhood.

It’s the effort it takes to push back — to integrate the daily horrors, rather than ignore them, and still find a way to go on raising a family and making a positive impact in the world — that leaves Groff’s characters battle-weary, isolated, and without a clear sense of how to navigate what’s next.

Not all of the pieces take place in the domestic sphere. In "Above and Beyond," a grad student who has lost her funding, her boyfriend, and her apartment lives out of her car until it is vandalized. She then becomes part of a tent city and, even later, a friendly settlement of squatters. Although she’s a literature student (she reads "Middlemarch" during the long, hot days) she observes her new communities with an anthropologist’s eye, comparing the rules and mores and tracking her own place in them with a detachment that seems key to survival.

It’s precisely Groff’s characters’ detachment that leaves readers holding their collective breath throughout “Florida” — waiting for what’s to come, without even realizing it, until the final exhale. Groff’s women — more often than not they are women in their late thirties, with small children, and emotionally overburdened for reasons that aren’t entirely clear — seem incapable of making good decisions. Groff’s alchemy renders them sympathetic despite this. It’s a magical author formula much easier to state than to replicate: astute and relevant observation plus wholly original description equals sentences that ring with the clarity of truth.

Though most of Groff’s stories are as tethered to reality as her mothers are to their children, the winds of magical realism do blow through some of these pages. In "Eyewall," for example, the narrator, a woman living alone in a large house on acres of waterfront property, chooses not to evacuate during a hurricane.

It turns out to be one of the bad ones. Groff captures the changing landscape for everyone who has lived through such a transformation. As the storm begins, “the lake goose-bumped; I might have been looking at the sensitive flesh of an enormous lizard. The swing in the oak made larger arcs over the water. The palmettos nodded, accepting the dance.” Soon enough, the violence outside picks up, the lights go out, and “the house went sinister behind me, oppressive with its dark humidity.” That’s when her visitors come: her disloyal ex-husband, now dead; her father, long gone; the boy she loved in college, a suicide victim. She hadn’t understood any of them when she’d had the chance, but the chaos outside gifts her another opportunity to make sense of her past.

In a very broad sense, the earnest effort to make sense of a situation will be familiar to readers of the Gainesville author’s 2015 best-seller, “Fates and Furies.” But the standout stories in “Florida” thrum with urgency and a sense of shared fate — partnership, even, with the reader — whereas the novel seemed at its core a brilliantly executed literary exercise.

Despite the professional-level despair on exhibit throughout “Florida,” there’s comfort to be found in this sense of partnership between the author and reader. From within that comfort peeks a sliver of optimism — just enough to keep the students of modern-day dread coming back for more.

Alison Buckholtz is author of “Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War.”