Lauren Groff’s new story collection is a portrait not so much of a place as of a particular kind of feeling about a place, as experienced by a series of characters, some of whom seem to be the same woman. She is the mother of two sons, and – like Mathilde in Groff’s acclaimed 2015 novel Fates and Furies, named book of the year by both Amazon and Barack Obama – she is furious beyond all measure. Unlike Mathilde, though, she has children, which raises the stakes. Also unlike Mathilde, she has no name.
“I have somehow become a woman who yells,” the first story, “Ghosts and Empties”, begins, as the mother tries to keep a cap on her anger for the sake of her family. To keep herself together, she goes walking at night, looking in at her neighbours, their lit windows like “domestic aquariums”: a group of nuns, a psychotherapist who had an affair with one of his patient’s wives (the patient shot the wife to death mid-coitus, then went to prison), a boy on a treadmill. Mostly, however, she observes the mothers of the neighbourhood, “bent like shepherdess crooks, scanning the floor for tiny Legos or half-chewed grapes or the people they once were, slumped in the corners”.
Some nights she comes home from her walks still fuming and her husband encourages her to take another lap around the block. “It’s too much, it’s too much,” she shouts at him. When she goes to the drugstore to buy Epsom salts for her aching feet, she is struck by the shop’s “abundance … 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”. She leaves without buying the thing she has come for “because I am not ready for such easy absolution as this. I can’t.”
These I can’ts and I won’ts accumulate across the collection, as each of the mothers delves into the reasons for her anger. “We need to constantly push against the narratives we are told to swallow,” Groff said in a New Yorker interview last year. This is what she shows in story after story: a heroic pushback against the way we live now, against waste, against the artificial environments in which we find ourselves maintained by corporations, but equally against the pressures on women to be flawless, effortlessly excellent mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, within this dire state of affairs.
Groff’s lyrical and oblique stories catch these women in the midst of becoming aware of their complicity in perpetuating these narratives – to which their response is to walk, flee, or conversely refuse to budge, as in the dazzlingly apocalyptic “Eyewall”, about a woman staying in her house during a hurricane. The well-meaning macho neighbour tries to get her to leave with him but he ends up being “wiped off the road” by the storm, “kiss[ing] the concrete rise of an overpass”. In “Above and Below”, the main character ups and leaves her graduate student existence, with its piled-up debts, and drifts into a more and more marginal life of homelessness. Other stories feature children abandoned by irresponsible adults, who weave in and out of the narratives like selfish giants.
Though they are written in a moodily realist mode, the stories are poised just this side of dystopian fiction. The end of the world, or of life as we know it, hovers somewhere in the not unimaginably far-off future. The mother in “Ghosts and Empties” “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.” This is echoed in the last story, “Yport”: “She can’t stop the thought that children born now will be the last generation of humans … She feels it nearing, the midnight of humanity.”
Not all of the stories are set in Florida, but if they range out to France several times, and to Brazil once, it is to get perspective on the “back home” from the far away, to juxtapose the Florida heat with the Normandy sea spray. The hot, humid Floridian atmosphere hangs over all the stories; the word “rot” appears in most of them, sometimes more than once. In several, the air-conditioning is out, but the organic presence of the rot and the heat is almost welcome against the “sickly fake cold air” filling most people’s houses. All manner of swamp creatures lurk and threaten; sometimes they breach the safety of the house. “Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you,” thinks the mother in “Snake Stories”: “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 its fangs in deep”. There is something off-kilter in these ecosystems; perhaps it is nature reasserting its primacy against the Anthropocene. Every woman, every snake, is fighting back against the laws of nature, and the human-made Eden that threatens to imprison, or end, them all.
• Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is published by Vintage.
• Florida is published by William Heinemann. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
