Review: Florida by Lauren Groff

Florida is a collection of masterfully written short stories about modern uncertainty and anxiety — the uneasy feeling that everything might fall apart with no warning at any minute. Eleven stories are narrated by female characters who don’t seem to have much in common except existential angst, which many readers can probably relate to, and a strong connection to the state of Florida.

This is literary fiction that hooked me not with action-packed plots, but with deep-dish servings of the southern psyche, framed by the orchestral chorus of cicadas, stalked by repitilan menace, and fanned by the sway of Spanish moss in sprawling oaks.

And because the language of Florida is in turns as lush and threatening and seductive as the ecosystem that infuses these stories, I’d like to share a few photos from one of my favorite northern Florida photographers to illustrate my review.

Long in Tooth
(Copyright David Moynahan Photography)

A bit of gushing about the scenery

As a native northern Floridian who has been merely a visitor for the last many years, I was mesmerized by Groff’s vision of the flora and fauna of my youth. These aren’t the white sand tourist beaches and theme parks, but the palmetto forests, ~~sinkholes~~ natural swimming pools, and pervasive wetlands and swamps where many of the locals live and play. Though not all of the stories are set in Florida, the Florida scenes were the sweetest for me. Groff inspired in me a renewed sense of wonder and appreciation for this fragile film of domesticity perched perilously atop an ancient limestone shelf, riddled with crystal clear waters that nourish the gentle and the ferocious, impartially.

Oasis of the Manatee, Volusia Blue Spring State Park
(Copyright David Moynahan Photography)

Groff’s descriptions of natural Florida are stunning. Through her words, I felt like I was right beside the characters, swiping at sweatdrops and slapping at mosquitoes. And that got me to reminiscing about my own youthful outdoor adventures in the exuberant biological abundance she so sublimely brings to life: camping in the palmetto forests, canoeing beneath canopy trees (literally) dripping with snakes, paddling amongst the sunning alligators, wandering the floodplains avoiding the water moccasins. Ah, youth, what was I thinking? I. Will. NEVER. Miss. Snakes.

Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you: snakes in mulch, snakes in scrub, snakes waiting from the lawn for you to leave the pool so they can drown themselves in it, snakes gazing at your mousy ankle and wondering what it would feel like to sink their fangs in deep.

Swamp King (aka Wench Kathi’s worst nightmare)
(Copyright David Moynahan Photography)

A bit of gushing about the stories

Florida captures the wild Florida outdoors with exquisite attention to detail, ambiance, and the roots that burrow deeply into one’s soul.

The Man Behind the Curtain
(Copyright David Moynahan Photography)

Groff also transforms this environment — lets her readers see it through new eyes, understand it through different perspectives, and explore its deep influence on the culture and psyche of Floridians.

Wood Stork
(Copyright David Moynahan Photography)

My heart simultaneously soared and ached to read poetic phrases that precisely captured the wonder and mystery I remember as the essence of Florida. Single sentences conjured a treasure trove of memories of life lived on screened porches, serenaded by wildlife, and cocooned in thick, fragrant heat.

Florida in the summer is a slow hot drowning.

One thing I liked was how the screens at night pulsed with the tender bellies of lizards.

Groff’s perceptive understanding of natural Florida extends far beyond picturesque descriptions of settings. The strong sense of place infiltrates each story in a central and slightly different way. Groff’s mesmerizing prose often merges and conflates outer and inner landscapes, reveals multiple layers of meaning. Real and imagined terrors lurk in the shadows and hide below the surface – of the characters’ conscious thoughts, of the teeming wilds and waters. A panther stalking a woman and her children becomes a metaphor for cancer, fears about loneliness and loss metamorphose into a sinkhole swallowing a house, a mysterious submarine mirrors the menace of nearby alligators and symbolizes our intrusion into the natural world.

Night Patrol
(Copyright David Moynahan Photography)

Whether ensconced in this (un)common terrain, or far away trying to figure out how they feel about it, the women in these stories share insecurities and fears that many mothers, daughters, and wives will recognize.

She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but not longer than they do.

Every pause between the end of one breath and the beginning of the next is long; then again, nothing is not always in transition.

What a relief that she has boys; this princess nonsense is a tragedy of multigenerational proportions. Stop waiting for someone to save you, humanity can’t even save itself!

Several also share our ~~obsessive~~ healthy fondness for books and reading.

She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.

It’s marvelous to know another person’s entire literary canon by heart. It’s like knowing their secret personal language.

These stories gave me pause to ponder what makes the southeasternmost point of the U.S. unique, and yet how we’re all the same in other ways, no matter where we live. Each of the 11 stories completely immersed me, though some plots and characters resonated more strongly than others.

First Light – Panorama
(Copyright David Moynahan Photography)

In the first story, Ghosts and Empties, a woman takes nightly runs through her neighborhood to unwind, where “the neighbors’ lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums”. Though not much action is happening on the surface, this was for me a lovely introduction to Groff’s layered writing style and magnificent sentence construction. She can say volumes in a sentence. And she sucked me right into this whole book with her opening sentence, because I could soooooo relate and needed to know more about this kindred spirit:

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 and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell.

In Eyewall, a woman toughs out a hurricane in her beach house with her dead husband’s exorbitantly expensive wine collection and the ghosts of relationships past.

In Dogs Go Wolf, two young girls who are abandoned on an island with their dog struggle together to find food and survive against the elements.

In The Midnight Zone, a young mother suffers a concussion while stranded with her children in a remote cabin, surrounded by dangers, waiting for her husband to return.

In Flower Hunters, a woman who feels rejected by her friends and family seeks to escape her persistent insecurities by immersing herself in books. Her current book boyfriend is William Bartram, an American naturalist who wrote about the plants he discovered on his travels during the early 19th century.

Florida, Bartram’s ghost has been trying to tell her all along, is erotic.
For years now, she has been unable to see it all around her, the erotic.

I’ll just let you guess what Snake Stories is about.

Prints in Sand
(Copyright David Moynahan Photography)

The looming specter of climate change permeates many of these stories set in the state poised to virtually disappear under rising oceans. The book’s final and IMHO best story, Yport, deals with this issue most directly. The main character runs off to France with her children in tow on a mission to distract herself from her deep sense of dissatisfaction and doubt. I could identify profoundly with the fears she expressed in the book’s closing moments.

A man had been appointed to take care of the environment even though his only desire was to squash the environment like a cockroach. I was thinking about the world my children will inherit, the clouds of monarchs they won’t ever see, the underwater sound of the mouths of small fish chewing the living coral reefs that they will never hear.

She can’t stop the thought that children born now will be the last generation of humans. Her sons have known only luck so far, though suffering will surely come for them. She feels it nearing, the midnight of humanity. Their world is so full of beauty, the last terrible flash of beauty before the long darkness.

East River Sunset, St. Marks
(Copyright David Moynahan Photography)

Ending on this note left me with a sense of despair, for this magnificent ecosystem and all that we cherish, though these stories aren’t really depressing. They do at times veer down dark paths, mirroring the political and cultural crossroads at which we find ourselves — as current residents of Earth — in the “dense damp tangle” of wild Florida. With words that hypnotize and haunt, Florida presents an intimate window into the ways we try to cope with a restless state of change and uncertainty — through the prism of an enigmatic “Eden of dangerous things”.

Now a hunger that cannot quite be located in the body comes over her, a sense of yearning, for what? Maybe for kindness, for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater that she is, something that can blanket her, no, no, something in which she can hide for a minute and be safe.