Lauren Groff made the long list for
the 2018 Man Booker Prize, but unfortunately, her newest novel, Florida, did not make the cut. This interesting novel focuses on eleven
people who live and work in and around Florida.
The stories are only loosely connected, but each is interesting in its
own way.
I was particularly
intrigued by “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners.” Groff writes, “Jude was born in a
Cracker-style house at the edge of a swamp that boiled with unnamed species of
reptiles. Few people lived in the center
of Florida then. Air-conditioning was
for the rich, and the rest compensated with high ceilings, sleeping porches,
attic fans. Jude’s father was a
herpetologist at the university, and if snakes hadn’t slipped their way into
their hot house, his father would have filled it with them anyway. Coils of rattlers sat in formaldehyde on the
windowsills. Writhing knots of reptiles
lived in the coops out back, where his mother had once tried to raise
chickens. At an early age, Jude learned
to keep a calm heart when touching fanged things. He was barely walking when his mother came
into the kitchen to find a coral snake chasing its red and yellow tale around
his wrist (13). When I was young, I had
an interest in snakes, but my interest waned when I could find none in a brown
stone row house in Philadelphia.
In “Eyewall,” an
attempt to raise chickens had some odd results.
Groff writes, “It began with chickens.
They were Rhode Island Reds and I’d raised them from chicks. Though I called until my voice gave out,
they’d huddled in the darkness under the house, a dim mass faintly
pulsing. Fine, you ungrateful turds! I’d
said before abandoning them to the storm.
I stood in the kitchen at the one window I left unboarded and watched
the hurricane’s bruise spreading in the west.
I felt the chickens’ rising through the floorboards to pass through me
like prayers” (64). Groff has a talent
for bringing into sharp relief, the two- and four-legged, as well as those with
no legs at all.
“Flower Hunters”
ends on a peculiar note. The unnamed
narrator wants to call her friend Meg, but she remembers Meg wanted to “take a
break” from their relationship. Lauren
writes, “Two weeks ago, she called Meg at eleven at night because she’d read an
article about the coral reef in the Gulf of Mexico being covered with a
mysterious whiteish slime that was killing them, and she knew enough to know
that when a reef collapses, so do dependent populations, and when they go, the
ocean goes” (167)
Snakes appear off
and on, and here is another, “Snake Stories.”
She writes, “It is strange to me, and alien in this place, and
ambivalent northerner, to see how my Florida sons takes snakes for
granted. My husband, digging out a peach
tree that had died from climate change, brought into the house a shovel full of
poisonous baby coral snakes, brightly enameled and writhing. Cook! Said my little boys, but I woke from
frantic sleep that night, slapping at my sheets, sure the light pressure on my
body was twining of many snakes that had slipped from the shovel and searched
until they found my warmth” (206).
Lauren Groff is a
writer who can easily describe a character in her stories as well as calmly
describing dangerous reptiles. Florida is a story for readers who abhor
snakes, as well as those who are fascinated by the scaly creatures. 5 stars.
--Chiron, 8/2/18
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