Florida has hung alluringly before me since it came out last year, the combination of "Ghosts and Empties" (the lead story in this collection) and Fates and Furies making me pretty sure I'd like it - and I do.
For a collection of 11 stories originally published over several years, there are some striking recurrences - storms, snakes, and the state of Florida itself, that last emerging as state of mind and state of being almost as synecdoche for the wider world, not to mention recurrences of situations, the most notable being flawed women who have chosen to isolate themselves in settings which prove inhospitable and depictions of what arises from the discomfort they then face. This obsessiveness is a strength, not a limitation - it adds to the sense that all of the stories are being told through the lens of a distinct vision, coupled with the general atmosphere of teeming, barely contained threat coexisting with the everyday difficulties experienced by her protagonists.
You can't read Lauren Groff without noticing the language, especially at a sentence level. At times it slips into being too ornate; that seems to have been the major obstacle to at least a couple of people I know's enjoyment of Fates and Furies (although, in that novel, it becomes apparent by the end that the overt 'literariness' of the register in which it's written is part of the point). But Florida shows how controlled she is as a writer, the stories mostly moving forward in clean, punchy sentences and paragraphs, and while she's unafraid to try out new formulations, which sometimes leads to a brief false note, the flourishes are more frequently present illuminating new ways of seeing the things she's writing about.
I also like how much of a sense of story there is to most of the pieces, with some stretching across an entire lifetime, either proportionately in time or with one or two large leaps - there's a confidence to the way Groff both immerses us in her characters' minds and pulls us forward through large pieces of plot, often littered with seemingly incidental events and observations that add a lot to the whole. I'm not sure I have favourites; in some ways they all run together a bit. But all told, Florida is quite something.
For a collection of 11 stories originally published over several years, there are some striking recurrences - storms, snakes, and the state of Florida itself, that last emerging as state of mind and state of being almost as synecdoche for the wider world, not to mention recurrences of situations, the most notable being flawed women who have chosen to isolate themselves in settings which prove inhospitable and depictions of what arises from the discomfort they then face. This obsessiveness is a strength, not a limitation - it adds to the sense that all of the stories are being told through the lens of a distinct vision, coupled with the general atmosphere of teeming, barely contained threat coexisting with the everyday difficulties experienced by her protagonists.
You can't read Lauren Groff without noticing the language, especially at a sentence level. At times it slips into being too ornate; that seems to have been the major obstacle to at least a couple of people I know's enjoyment of Fates and Furies (although, in that novel, it becomes apparent by the end that the overt 'literariness' of the register in which it's written is part of the point). But Florida shows how controlled she is as a writer, the stories mostly moving forward in clean, punchy sentences and paragraphs, and while she's unafraid to try out new formulations, which sometimes leads to a brief false note, the flourishes are more frequently present illuminating new ways of seeing the things she's writing about.
I also like how much of a sense of story there is to most of the pieces, with some stretching across an entire lifetime, either proportionately in time or with one or two large leaps - there's a confidence to the way Groff both immerses us in her characters' minds and pulls us forward through large pieces of plot, often littered with seemingly incidental events and observations that add a lot to the whole. I'm not sure I have favourites; in some ways they all run together a bit. But all told, Florida is quite something.
