Stormy Weather
Florida is known as the pensioners’ paradise, where elderly people retire, to get the benefits of its beaches and warm weather.
However in Lauren Groff’s book, made up of eleven stories, Florida, it is place of unbearable heat, humidity and all manner of human misery. Four are about young women with families and an inability to cope with the normal challenges of daily life.
The first story, Ghosts and Empties, begins with the line, “I have somehow become a woman who yells.” The woman has lost the patience and the gentleness needed to raise kids. So while her husband puts the children to bed, she gets out of the house and walks around the neighbourhood, as “the neighbors’ lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums.” Her own rage radiating off her, she observes other mothers, “bent like shepherdess crooks, scanning the floor for tiny Legos or half-chewed grapes or the people they once were, slumped in the corners”.
It may or may not be the same hapless woman in The Midnight Zone, who is left alone with her two sons on a camping trip, when her husband is called away urgently. She falls off a stool and hits her head, so the little boys have to look after her and hold fort till their father returns.
Even more discomfiting is Dogs Go Wolf in which two little girls are abandoned on an island, and while it seems like an adventure for a while, when starvation hits, the reader hopes they will miraculously be rescued.
In the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God story, Above and Below a young woman is reduced to homelessness.
The stories (some set outside Florida too) simply overturn all images of The Sunshine State and expose what lies beneath. There are storms, power outages, decay, snakes and ecological disasters waiting to happen. But most of all Groff breaks the mirror that shows women a fake picture of marital and maternal bliss.
