Lauren Groff's Florida Stories

Lauren Groff became the reviewers' darling after her successful novels "The Monsters of Templeton," and "Fates and Furies," came out. I read them both and I'm here to tell you that her collection of short stories, which will be published the first week of June, rise above her previous work. And I don't even like short stories! I reviewed this collection for my radio program at my local NPR station http://news.wgcu.org/programs/florida-book-page  but it won't likely be aired until the fall. I can't let you wait that long to be made aware of these powerful stories. Here's a reduced version of my opinion.

Lauren Groff’s Florida is not the world of Disney princesses or performing whales that most folks associate with the sunshine state. No, Groff’s Florida is a borderline dangerous place where racial tensions run high, homelessness is rampant, and women and children are often imperiled. Humidity seeps into everything. Snakes, gators, and ants populate old cracker homes in the north Florida swamps where air conditioning is only for the wealthy. The atmosphere in these stories is as heavy and dank as the air.

But this is not a criticism. In fact, Groff’s words are luminous. Her characters are complex, often lonely, like Jude whose mother deserted him and his father in order to save her sanity. Back in Boston she owns a bookstore but by the time Jude finds her, his mother’s smothering need to atone for her absence drives him away.

Then there are the two sisters left alone during a storm in an old fishing camp. Before long the generator dies. Without food they resort to eating a chap stick they find in a drawer. They brave the saw palmetto scrub until they find a pond from which they draw water for boiling. The older sister is resourceful and clever. She reads to the little one, keeping her safe for as long as she can.

Most powerful of all are the personal essays that bookend this collection, each reflecting the stream of consciousness ruminations of the author, a wife who eschews the traditional role, and mother of two boys who fill her with love but also with the desire for escape. At night she runs through her neighborhood, burning off her anger at the present state of the world, fearful of the future her boys will face, and resentful of the partner who sleeps undisturbed through her nocturnal wanderings.

In the final story this same woman flees Florida’s summer steam and storms for the Normandy beach town of Yport, ostensibly to research Guy de Maupassant, but hoping to rekindle her collegiate love of all things French and instill it in her boys.

Painfully honest, deeply disturbing, sometimes redemptive, this collection of stories should be savored slowly, allowing Groff’s painterly language to awaken all your senses. You will be able to see, smell, hear, and almost taste the Florida she evokes with her words.

Joyce Maynard is Under the Influence

I read an editorial by Joyce Maynard in the paper a few weeks back (http://nyti.ms/1R8kEcL) and was reminded, once again, why I've been drawn to her writing for so long. If there's a certain sense of melancholy throughout most of her work, one need only read her memoir "At Home in the World," to understand why. Considered controversial when it first came out, Maynard recalls the year that she spent at a vulnerable stage in her life, living with, (under the influence of), the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, who was thirty years her senior.

I found that the title of her latest book, "Under the Influence," actually pretty accurately describes a good portion of her life as a woman working very hard to climb out from under other people's influence.

 

If you happened to see the Kate Winslet film, Labor Day, based on Maynard's novel of the same name, then you'll remember the theme, sort of a Stockholm Syndrome effect, where a captive falls "under the influence" of her captor. No surprise, the book was much more believable and suspenseful, a credit to Maynard's talent as a writer.

 

Returning to this convention, Maynard has turned out a truly disquieting novel, in which the danger facing Helen, our very unlucky protagonist, creeps up on the reader slowly but inexorably, so that we're never sure from whence it will come or how it will manifest itself. Yet there's no doubt that it's always bubbling under the surface.

 

Helen, a single mom, loves her son Ollie to distraction. So it's all the more difficult to read the chapters in which she loses custody of her boy to a vindictive ex after an episode that involves too much alcohol and no friends to count on in a pinch. It could have happened to anybody, and the punishment seems outsize to the crime, but it sets us up to root for Helen's recovery and redemption.

 

And suddenly her luck changes. When Ava and Swift Havilland take an inordinate interest in Helen, it's almost as if she's one of their many rescue dogs. They employ her, they try to remake her over in their image, revamping her clothes, her style, her sense of self. They make her feel indispensable to their life, plying her with personal questions while revealing little if anything about their own provocative marriage. And then they hold out the carrot.

 

Maybe their high powered lawyer can work on her custody case as a favor. After all, since she introduced Ollie to the Havillands, the tension of the former visits between mother and son has disappeared. Ollie is enchanted with Swift, a man who rarely seems to work but has money to burn and nothing but time to shower on a kid who's desperate for attention. But we keep worrying, what's the stick?

 

This suspenseful novel is also psychologically astute. Maynard must have learned early on, the power of observation. Helen is a photographer. She sees people more clearly through a lens. In fact, a camera will play a large role in the denouement of this compelling story of an insecure woman who learns through trial and error to value herself above all.