 | A WRITER'S WIT |  M. Van Doren |
MY BOOK WORLD
Groff, Lauren. Florida. New York: Random, 2018.
As I begin reading this collection of stories, I am doubtful that the author can convince me to like Florida any more than I already do (which isn’t much). Most of my life it has been a way station—to the Bahamas, to Europe, but not a destination of its own—except for two different trips to Key West which actually were delightful. Ms. Groff, however, takes readers into a Florida of gators, snakes, insects, and heat, relentless heat and humidity. But also a place of wild human animals.
There is Jude, “born in a Cracker-style house at the edge of a swamp that boiled with unnamed species of reptiles” (15). There is an older sister who thinks “an island is never really quiet. Even without the storm, there were waves and wind and air conditioners and generators and animals moving out there in the dark” (44). On a stormy night, a woman’s young sons “told me about the World Pool, in which one current goes one way, another goes another way, and where they meet they make a tornado of air, which stretches, said my little one, from the midnight zone, where the fish are blind, all the way up up up to the birds” (77). One narrative titled “Snake Stories” reads like this: “Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you: 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 their fangs in deep” (204).
Groff is unafraid to tell readers about human snakes, as well: ne’er do well fathers, skanky women, mean children, perhaps all made malicious by the climate: hot and humid twenty-four/seven. Yet, as Florida’s large population must attest to, there has to be something wonderful about the place: tempting seafood, cool breezes off the water, mild winters, and empathic people here and there who stop to help someone in trouble.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Carol Anderson
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Sylvia Field Porter
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Salman Rushdie
FRI: My Book World | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance
As I begin reading this collection of stories, I am doubtful that the author can convince me to like Florida any more than I already do (which isn’t much). Most of my life it has been a way station—to the Bahamas, to Europe, but not a destination of its own—except for two different trips to Key West which actually were delightful. Ms. Groff, however, takes readers into a Florida of gators, snakes, insects, and heat, relentless heat and humidity. But also a place of wild human animals.
There is Jude, “born in a Cracker-style house at the edge of a swamp that boiled with unnamed species of reptiles” (15). There is an older sister who thinks “an island is never really quiet. Even without the storm, there were waves and wind and air conditioners and generators and animals moving out there in the dark” (44). On a stormy night, a woman’s young sons “told me about the World Pool, in which one current goes one way, another goes another way, and where they meet they make a tornado of air, which stretches, said my little one, from the midnight zone, where the fish are blind, all the way up up up to the birds” (77). One narrative titled “Snake Stories” reads like this: “Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you: 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 their fangs in deep” (204).
Groff is unafraid to tell readers about human snakes, as well: ne’er do well fathers, skanky women, mean children, perhaps all made malicious by the climate: hot and humid twenty-four/seven. Yet, as Florida’s large population must attest to, there has to be something wonderful about the place: tempting seafood, cool breezes off the water, mild winters, and empathic people here and there who stop to help someone in trouble.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Carol Anderson
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Sylvia Field Porter
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Salman Rushdie
FRI: My Book World | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance
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