Book Review Article, Lauren Groff, FLORIDA

Book Review Article

Lauren Groff, Florida, NY: Riverhead Books, 2018

For the past couple of years I’ve been reading lots of short story collections by living American writers, looking for something that sparks with creativity, not often finding much. Lauren Groff is generally accepted as one of the prime divas of the MFA world of writing. The stories in this collection have been previously published in some of the premier venues in the U.S.: The New Yorker, American Short Fiction, Granta, Tin House, among others. They have been featured as well in three different anthologies of Best American Short Stories. Does that mean they are good? Alas, owing to the stranglehold that the standard MFA racket in fiction holds on these once-august publications, I’ve learned not to get my expectations up too high. 

Given the title of Lauren Groff’s collection it is not surprising that most of the stories here are set in Florida; even when we take a leap in setting to France—in two of them—the characters still have Florida connections. Lauren Groff herself lives in Gainesville, Florida, along with her husband and two young sons. So it is also not surprising that five of the eleven stories feature a narrator living in Gainesville with a husband and two young sons. The best of these is probably the first, “Ghosts and Empties,” which begins like this.

“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.”

Here we have what you could call the inadequate mother theme, which shows up several more times in other stories. In addition, four central characters make their first appearance: the ideal husband and the neurotic woman narrator, the two sons, all of whom show up again in “The Midnight Zone,” “Flower Hunters,” “Snake Stories,” and “Yport.”

On the first page of the book we note that the author has a good feel for the sights and smells of Florida, the “oak dust, slime mold, camphor,” along with the Deep South, “with its boiled peanuts and its Spanish moss dangling like armpit hair.” Full disclosure: I too live in Gainesville, Florida, and I appreciate the detailed description in “Ghosts and Empties” of what and whom you’ll see walking any night down by the Duck Pond.

Unlike myself, a native Floridian, Lauren Groff, is a Yankee interloper, and that sometimes gets her in trouble with the locals. Recently one of them sent a long plaint to the Gainesville Sun, arguing that someone not a native does not have the right to be so negative about things like Spanish moss (armpit hair). Then again, describing Spanish moss metaphorically is fully as difficult as describing the hirundine joy of swallows in flight; I know of no author who has accomplished such description with panache, and lots of them have tried.

“Florida in the summer is a slow hot drowning” (“Yport”), and throughout the whole collection much is made of the dank, humid, mephitic air. In fact, a better title would be The Florida Malaise, or Fear and Loathing in the Sunshine State. Out on her evening walks, amidst “the human flotsam of the homeless in sleeping bags,” and everywhere else as well, the neurotic narrator senses danger in the air. She even craves anxiety, wallows in  bad vibrations:

“I can’t stop reading about the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, the great Pacific trash gyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species, millennia snuffed out as if they were not precious. I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.”

As Yogi Berra once remarked, “Being scared can be really scary,” and being scared is a leitmotif of this story collection. There is beauty all around, “camellias and peach trees and dogwoods and oranges,” but beauty is not enough to outshine the malaise. Luckily, Groff can write well, and the grace of her sentences—while apparently of little comfort to the overwrought narrator—sometimes helps the reader cope with the scariness of our world.

Mothers: “I see the mothers I know in glimpses, bent like shepherdess crooks, scanning the floor for tiny Legos or half-chewed grapes or the people they once were, slumped in the corners.” I don’t much like the simile of the shepherdess crooks (seems forced, doesn’t work), but the thing of people looking around for their former selves, only to find them slumped in corners, is good. Air conditioners: “Soon they’ll all be on, crouched like trolls under the windows, their collective tuneless hum drowning out the night birds and frogs . . .” Window units as wheezing trolls: that’s great.

More on the stories featuring the neurotic woman narrator, a writer, with the two sons and the ideal husband. As we learn in “The Midnight Zone,” this narrator worships at the shrine of Feminism, which has been the religion of middle-class muliebrity in America since the 1970s. Here the narrator reveals that she is “an incompetent woman” interested only in her books and her children, but she refuses the accepted motherly role: “all that seemed assigned by default of gender I would not do because it felt insulting. I would not buy clothes [what’s insulting about that?], I would not make dinner, I would not keep schedules . . . Motherhood meant for me that I would take the boys on monthlong adventures to Europe.”

This last detail reveals that this is the same narrator as we are to meet in “Yport,” a story describing one of these European jaunts, in which a neurotic author goes to France—ostensibly to do research on Guy de Maupassant, a writer she hates. Overcome by a sense of dread, a malaise she had hoped to escape—but when you travel your tsuris goes with you—she does nothing in France but drink large quantities of wine. Wishing they were back home, but patient, touchingly tolerant of Mom, the boys indulge her whims. Obviously, here is where they take after ideal husband Dad.

“The Midnight Zone” is centered upon the narrator’s fear of being attacked by a Florida panther—a picture of which (minus the snout) is featured on the dust jacket of the book. While the family is spending time at an old hunting camp in the woods, the narrator’s husband is called away, but she refuses to go with him. “My rebelliousness at the time was like a sticky fog rolling through my body and never burning off.” She stays with the boys in the woods, “she who is frightened of everything” (this citation is from “The Flower Hunters”), nursing her irrational fears of the panther: “if anyone was going to die it was going to be us, our skulls popping in the jaws of an endangered cat.”

It is here that the reader begins to realize—if he has not realized earlier—that the Florida malaise in this story collection is largely the malaise of the neurotic narrator projected out into the Florida air. After all, the last attack of an endangered Florida panther on a human being dates so far back into history that it resides in some Never-Never Land.

What is the problem with having five of the eleven stories featuring this same anxiety-ridden narrator? The problem is that the reader gets tired of her. Okay, so writers are fearful, neurotic creatures. We all know that. Throughout the twentieth century we have been inundated with angst-ridden stories written by angst-ridden narrators; now it’s a new century, even a new millennium—why not give us a break? The fact that a writer has her anxieties should not be surprising, and is not surprising in this book as well. But a canny writer should know that presenting this image to the world at large, in your fiction, can get old fast. With me this happens as early as late in the first story.

The ownself-obsessed narrator goes in a drugstore to buy Epsom salts: “into this abundance with its aisles of gaudy trash and useless wrapping and plastic pull tabs that will one day end up in the throat of the earth’s last sea turtle. I find myself limping, and the limp morphs into a kind of pained bopping because the music dredges up elementary school, when my parents were, astonishingly, younger than I am now, and that one long summer they listened on repeat to Paul Simon singing over springy African drums about a trip with a son, the human trampoline, the window in the heart. It is both too much and too little, and I leave without the salts because I am not ready for such easy absolution as this. I can’t.”

At this point, the phrase “easy absolution” somehow is the last straw. I have already had too much of this narrator, fearing the very air she walks in, whining about a world in which “nothing is not always in transition.” Meanwhile, we presume, ideal husband is back home feeding the kids and getting them in bed. The narrator, “exhausting to everyone,” is “a woman who would like to take a break from herself, but she doesn’t have that option” (“Flower Hunters”). That’s it exactly: very early on I need a break from this character.

Probably the most interesting thing about the five stories featuring the neurotic narrator is the husband of the tale. We never get a good look at him; for the most part he is always pottering around somewhere in the background. But there are implications that the ideal husband has flaws. In the very first story the narrator returns from a walk. Her husband is in the bathroom, “and I flipped open his computer and saw what I saw there, a conversation not meant for me, a snip of flesh that was not his.” Later on (in “Snake Stories”) we learn that the husband, this “almost entirely good person,” is attracted to another man’s wife. This same story describes “terrible things happening in the world at large, marriages ending, either in a sort of quiet drifting away or in flames.”

A quote from “Flower Hunters”: “This is not to say that she is no longer in love with her husband; she is, but after sixteen years together, perhaps they have blurred at the edges of each other’s vision.” A few pages later in the same story: “She is frightened because maybe she has already become so cloudy to her husband that he has begun to look right through her; she’s frightened of what he sees on the other side.” Taken as a whole, therefore, if you read all five stories featuring the narrator writer, the husband and two sons, the implication is definitely there: divorce is looming on the horizon.

For reasons expressed above, for me the best stories in the collection are not the five just discussed. “Dogs Go Wolf” tells of two little girls abandoned on some deserted island, left to fend for themselves and doing well at the fending. The story is well-written, well structured. It has a beginning, middle and end, as does another fine tale, “For the God of Love, For the Love of God.” This one features characters set adrift in France, most of them barely hanging on to a semblance of sanity, while the two youngest of them, a four-year-old boy and a girl of twenty-one, exult in being alive and planning for their future.

Here's the girl, in the concluding paragraph:

“This sky huge with stars. Glorious, Mina thought, as she walked toward them. The cold in the air, the smell of cherries wafting up from the trees, the veal and endives cooking in the kitchen, the pool with its own moon, the stone house, the vines, the country full of velvet-eyed Frenchmen. Even the flicks of candlelight on those angry faces at the table was romantic. Everything was beautiful. Anything was possible. The whole world had been split open like a peach. And these poor people, these poor fucking people. Were they too old to see it? All they had to do was reach out and pluck it and raise it to their lips, and they would taste it, too.”

Here’s the boy: “Leo bit carefully into his toast and Nutella, watching Amanda. She’d never met a child with beady eyes before. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment, usually in middle age.”

There’s three nice sentences for you, the meditation on beadiness. Here are some more. “The camphor and magnolia and crape myrtles pressed their crowns to the earth, backbending, acrobats. My teak picnic table galumphed itself toward the road, chasing after the chairs already fled that way” (from “Eyewall,” a story describing riding out a hurricane). “In the absence of tiny ghouls, the lizards come out one last time, frilling their red necks, doing push-ups on the sidewalk” (“Flower Hunters”). 

Walk the streets of Gainesville on a hot spring or summer’s day; you’ll see the lizards out there doing that frilling. Why? I presumed because insects are attracted to the little reddish-pink or orange balloon that the anoles puff out from their scrawny little necks. I was wrong. The internet tells me that male anole lizards do the puffing thing in mating season, to attract females. Along with the puffout they perform a little mating dance, which sometimes includes what looks like push-ups. Nice observation, Lauren Groff.

Speaking of well-structured stories, having read a great many American short stories by living writers in the past couple of years, I find that the MFA rules-makers—most of them profs in creative writing courses at universities—seem to be giving writers a pass these days. Apparently, it is okay to write long rambling stories, which meander on for a lot of pages—doing without much of a beginning, a middle, an end, a climax, a denouement. In Groff’s collection such stories are “Above and Below,” and “Yport.”

Especially offensive to a reader who craves artistic structure is another of these, “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners.” Over the course of twenty-eight pages this story meanders through the life of a Florida man named Jude. In other words, what we have here is a kind of short novel, masquerading as a story. Wandering through a world of snakes, tormented by memories of his herpetologist father, Jude never really gets anywhere, but in the last line of the story he “knew he had been lucky, and that he had escaped the hungry dark once more.” Okay.

Sometimes, still speaking structurally, the stories take long leaps forward into the future, before returning to tell out the present time. In “Above and Below,” another meandering narrative about a young middleclass woman who drifts into homelessness and vagabondage, the ending of the tale leaps ahead, to a scene of the protagonist looking back on her homeless life, “during the long and terrible birth of her daughter, years later, after her mother’s funeral on a hill white with sleet.” 

The story transports the reader briefly forward to the white-sleeted hill, then ends with a description of the birth while looking back. The stylistic acrobatics here make for an interesting structure. You write a story of a character’s lost days of wandering, then jump ahead far into the future, only to focus on how the protagonist of the future looks back on the events of the present-time story.

In “Dogs Go Wolf,” the story of the two little girls abandoned on an island, we suddenly get this:

“Through the years to come, she’d remember these days of calm. She’d hold these beautiful soft days in her as the years slowly moved from terrible to bearable to better, and she would feel herself growing, sharpening. She’d learn the language of men and use it against them: she’d become a lawyer . . . . . . the little sister met a man who first gave her love, then withdrew it until she believed the things he believed. He made her give up her last name, which the older sister had fought their whole childhood to keep, though their third foster parents had wanted to adopt them, because it was the only thing they had of their mother. And then one day the older sister stood in the pews and watched her baby sister get married to this man. She wore a white dress with a skirt so giant she could barely walk, and bound herself to that man. The older sister watched and started to shake. She cried. An ugly wish spread in her like ink in water: that she and her sister had stayed on the island all those years ago; that they’d slowly vanished into their hunger until they turned into sunlight and dust.”

What we have here is a touch of what happens all the way through the story of Jude: a short story attempting, in one fell swoop, to make a novella of itself. The basic story tells of the two lost girls on the island, but, suddenly, new scenes swoop in—scenes that have no part in the story being told. Scenes describing years of the girls’ future lives with foster parents, scenes describing law school for the first sister and marriage (apparently unhappy) for the second sister. As in “Above and Below,” we have the narrative device of placing a protagonist far into the future, then showing that protagonist’s look back into the present time of the story.

One more thing that this leaping ahead business does for the reader: it assures him/her that the present predicament of the characters will be overcome. The lost little girls on the island will not die there; they will be found, and will go on to lead long lives. This is a kind of reassurance in advance; the story ends when they are rescued, but at the time of the leap forward their rescue is not guaranteed. The lost protagonist wandering homeless around Gainesville, she who has given up on middleclass respectability, will some day return to the middleclass life, bury her mother, have a baby.

So I suppose that the device, among other things, is the author’s take on a happy ending. Go down to Satchel’s Pizza tonight. Sit around and have a beer. You’ll see that same once-lost protagonist sitting there, with her daughter, exulting in the mildew, the smells of camphor, the beggar lice on her shoelaces, the lugubrious coos of the mourning doves and the thick, mephitic Florida air.

A few observations by the way: (1) five to six months out of the year is monsoon season in Gainesville; yet Groff’s stories, somehow, don't seem to have enough rain in them; (2) to me the most mournful sound in the Florida air, on a searing summer’s day, is the coo of a mourning dove; yet Groff has no doves in her stories; (3) she does get in one mention of satsumas, though, and that’s great. What would North and Central Florida be without satsumas?

                                                                

                                                            The Florida Panther

ON CREATIVE WRITING AND CREATIVE WRITERS

U.R. Bowie

Observations on Creative Writing and Creative Writers

“Writing shows its influences by the contagion of rhythm and pacing more often than by exact imitation of ideas. We know that Updike read Nabokov in the nineteen sixties by the sudden license Updike claims to unsubdue  his prose, to make his sentences self-consciously exclamatory, rather than by an onset of chess playing or butterfly collecting.”

                                                     Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, Jan. 16, 2017, p. 84

Most of today’s creative writing in America is highly imitative, lacking the creative spark of originality. Writers imitate other writers: their themes, their literary form, their tone, everything. Much of what is published amounts to bad imitations of bad stories to begin with. The imitators apparently took the bad stories for good ones. A writer writes another bad story imitating a previous bad story. How does a writer avoid such a misfortune? Read the greatest writers who have ever lived. Read Lev Tolstoy, Flannery O’Connor, Flaubert, Gogol, Rebecca West, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf,  many many others in the grand pantheon of world literature. If you must imitate somebody, try imitating them. Don’t bother reading ninety-five percent of living American writers, even the ones who have won awards.

Then there is the brilliant young writer who proclaims, “Why do I got to read all them old dead white men (plus a few dead white women)? Me, I got my own ideas!” How do we answer such a proclamation? We say, “Duh, yeah.”

About imitation. One thing that’s ever so hard to be is original. Good writers present something novel in tone or style; a good writer has his/her own voice. When you find your voice you have begun. Some writers never begin.

On The Envy of the Creative Writer

One day a writer of creative literary fiction sits down and writes a masterpiece. Other writers are plunged into sorrowful depression, thinking, “Dang, there are only a limited number of masterpieces to be written, and now this guy has filched another one and run off with it.”

                                                      Paraphrase of James Salter, The Art of Fiction, p. 50

As for myself I don’t even know what Salter is talking about here. I don’t have any feelings of envy whatsoever. Never have had. What’s wrong with me? I just read the brilliant novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Didn’t feel envious of him; just felt, “Wonderful, how great to have a young writer writing at that level of creativity.” Then again, I don’t know what writer’s block is either; can’t even conceive of not being able to write—unless I go blind or senile. Guess I’m just dumb.

What do good creative writers do? They “make the shape and rhythm of sentences intensely felt” (Salter, p. 56). Yes!

Then there’s the aspiring creative writer who proclaims, “I’m not interested in rhythms of sentences; I want to write about ideas.” Urggh.

Here’s the layman’s image of a writer who teaches creative writing in a university: “… a dramatic figure striking in appearance, wearing boots and jodhpurs, perhaps, with long white hair like a prophet and bearing a kind of literary ichor, the fluid in the veins of the gods” (Salter, p. 57).

Can that white-haired prophet teach you to write? No, you have to learn yourself, through years and years of intensive practice, while reading only the best creative writers who ever lived and learning from them.

Salter mentions his friend Saul Bellow, who once remarked on “the sexual heartlessness of women.” As Salter says, “Women were especially on his mind at the time since his ex-wife—his third—was suing him for more money, given that he’d received the Nobel Prize with the six or seven hundred thousand dollars that came with it” (p. 58, 61). No big secret there—that women can be sexually heartless, or even just plain heartless, or mercenary, cruel or meretricious. But so can men. Welcome to the human race.

We Write Ourselves

“In a copy of a book that Colum McCann signed for an auction of first editions, beside the disclaimer that is always printed proclaiming that the book is a work of fiction, the names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and that any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, beside this McCann wrote simply, ‘Bullshit’” (Salter, p. 38).

Then again, you don’t want to get sued, do you?

Important Books and Unimportant Books

“Books that are important weren’t written to be important, generally. They became such. By important, I mean so-deemed. Referred to. I can’t think that The Catcher in the Rye was written as an important, life-altering or significant book. I believe that it was simply heartfelt. To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t bear marks of an intended importance although I don’t know what Harper Lee actually felt. Fitzgerald thought all of his books were important. The Great Gatsby was a short book, only 214 pages, and he was insistent that the publisher sell it at the same price as his longer ones” (Salter, p. 42-43).

Speaking of the so-deemed, the above paragraph demonstrates the sometimes dated opinions of James Salter. Read by everyone and his brother in the fifties and the sixties, The Catcher in the Rye is read by practically no one these days. Not only not important, but already moribund, almost dead.  To Kill a Mockingbird is still widely read, its so-deemed greatness still afloat, but it is “a book for children” (as Flannery O’Connor said), and for people who do not or cannot read real literature. As for The Great Gatsby, this book has claims to being the Great American Novel; it should be sold at twice the price of any other book.

Where and When You Write And Who Is Helping You Out

“You don’t do all the writing at your desk. You do it elsewhere, carrying the book with you. The book is your companion, you have it in your mind all the time, running through it, alert for links to it. It becomes your chief companion, in the real sense of the word, you can talk to it quietly. It becomes your sole companion” (Salter, p. 76).

What Salter hints at here is that, unbeknownst to you, the book is writing itself in your mind all the time. Your deepest neurons of the brain work on the writing day and night. As recent studies in brain science have revealed, on a conscious level we have no idea about the decisions those independent neurons are making. Romantic writers used to think of themselves as the amanuensis of the gods, who guided their pens and sent down original ideas. But more likely writers are the amanuensis of their own creative neurons. When your favorite character suddenly does something totally unexpected on the page, it’s not because God so decided. The neurons decided—and they very well may have made that decision at three a.m. in the morning, while you were fast asleep.

“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real” (Salter, p. 77).

Selected Passages from the Writings of Good, and Sometimes Great Writers

[description of a ritual butcher in a Ukrainian shtetl, inspecting the lungs of a cow or sheep he has butchered] “the glossy brownish organs . . . . . the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone—from a mouse to a man—had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin” (David Bezmozgis, The Free World).

“Her light-brown hair was drawn smoothly back and gathered in a knot low on her neck, but near the right temple a single lock fell loose and curling, not far from the place where an odd little vein branched across one well-marked eyebrow, pale blue and sickly amid all that pure, well-nigh transparent spotlessness. That little blue vein above the eye dominated quite painfully the whole fine oval of the face” (Thomas Mann, “Tristan”). [Mann is great at describing human faces, human bodies.]

[description of a delicatessen] “there were glass showcases where smoked mackerel, lampreys, flounders, and eels were displayed on platters to tempt the appetite. There were dishes of Italian salad, crayfish spreading their claws on blocks of ice, sprats pressed flat and gleaming goldenly from open boxes; choice fruits—garden strawberries and grapes as beautiful as though they had come from the Promised Land; rows of sardine tins and those fascinating little white earthenware jars of caviar and foie gras…” (Thomas Mann, Felix Krull) [Mann is also great at describing a scene by accumulating masses of detail; in this he reminds me of Nikolai Gogol.]

“She’d never met a child with beady eyes. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment,

usually in middle age” (Lauren Groff, “For the God of Love, for the Love of God”).

“She felt a single drop of sweat slip from the small of her back, hang for an instant, and then slide into the mellow groove between the flexed jaws of her buttocks” (Harry Crews, A Feast of Snakes).

“A vast strand of white fleece, brutally bright, moved south to north in the eastern vault of the heavens, a rush of splendid wool to warm the day” (William Kennedy, Ironweed).

“joyfully gazing out from behind the cobblestone barrier are white crosses and monuments, which hide in the greenery of cherry trees and look from afar like white spots . . . . . when the cherry trees bloom these white spots blend with the cherry blossoms to form a broad seascape of white; and when the fruit ripens the white monuments and crosses are bedizened with specks that are blood-scarlet in color” (Anton Chekhov, “The Steppe”). [Chekhov’s tone-poem novella, “The Steppe,” full of such brilliant nature descriptions, was much influenced by his friend, the wonderful landscape painter Levitan.]

“You know, I have an uncle who’s a country priest, and the man is such a believer that when, in time of drought, he goes out into the fields to pray for rain, he takes with him an umbrella and leather raincoat, so that on the way back home he won’t get soaked” (Chekhov, “The Duel”).

“there was something wooden about his walk, something like the walk of toy soldiers, the way he barely bent his knees and tried to make each stride as long as possible” (Chekhov, “The Steppe”). [Chekhov loves describing how people walk. Tolstoy, who loved Chekhov when he met him, marveled at the way Chekhov himself walked. “He has the walk of a little miss of the noble class,” said Tolstoy with delight.]

“In sadness there is some alloy of pleasure. There is some shadow of delicacy and quaintness which smileth and fawneth upon us, even in the lap of melancholy. . . . . Painters are of the opinion that the motions and wrinkles in the face which serve to weep serve also to laugh” (Michel de Montaigne, “We Taste Nothing Purely”).

[Desdemona, reveling in the stories Othello tells her about his adventurous life] “She swore in faith ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange; ‘twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful. She wished she had not heard it; yet she wished that heaven had made her such a man” (Shakespeare, “Othello”).