But for the most part, the characters featured are unnamed, driven women with children. Jude, in “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” the mathematician son of bookish Northern mother and cruel, snake-obsessed Southern father, gropes his way through life. Helen in “Salvador,” experiences a natural and personal cataclysm while on vacation in Brazil. Groff’s eleven stories are largely in third person, and only three feature protagonists with names. Like a botanist, in Florida, Groff crossbreeds fertile strands of storytelling and fairytale to harvest new means to represent an anxious present in short fiction. The short stories in Florida are like specimens in a greenhouse-carefully pruned and curated, some constructed and let to seed, some placed just so. So seductive and self-contained is Groff’s writing that any metaphor or explanation for how the words and ideas of this collection move already exist in the book itself. Florida is no less ambitious, but here Groff is subtler, prowling like the panther paused on the book’s cover.įlorida inoculates itself against strong description. Each line of Groff’s most recent novel, Fates and Furies, snapped like a punch to heart.
Groff’s prior work is notable for its ambitious and sprawling style. Florida is Lauren Groff’s fifth book and second short story collection.
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