Change is a Sliver Lining, discussing Florida

Change is a Silver Lining

By Jamie Harper

In reading the first story of Lauren Groff’s collection Florida, I was struck by how much it reminds me of a story I read recently for my flash fiction class, titled Lead Us Not into Penn Station by Amy Hempel. Like Hempel’s flash, Groff’s work, ‘Ghosts and Empties’ presents a sort of list, or catalog, of human experience. Hempel focused on illness or bodily harm, on the absurdities of human violence that we become numb to within our everyday lives, while in contrast, Groff presents her catalog of human worries, injustices, and damages with a silver lining.

Groff gives us a number of examples of humans suffering under the gentrified veneer of the middle class. “The facade is preserved, the rest is gutted” (p. 5) she writes, telling us of the character who provides us the narrative point of view, a woman who cannot help but yell at her husband and children, the sickly woman walking her great dane, the homeless endemic, the dying breed of the nunnery, and the neighbors who go about the shells of their lives, looking for “the people they once were” (p. 5). The unnamed narrator walks each night, patrolling the streets of her neighborhood as a means of relieving the tension she builds as she fights with her husband, yells at her children, discovers her husband's adultery, and suffers an existential crisis of the simultaneously over- and underwhelming American middle class life. On these walks, she peers into the fleeting snap shots of her neighbor’s lives as they are framed by the window panes of their houses, noting the things that stay the same, but being blindsided by those that change.

It is this change that provides the silver lining in Groff’s story, as the overweight neighbor gains the ability to run on his treadmill, and the new owners of the nunnery highlight the beauty, strength, and age of the live oak in the front yard, and the narrator finds a tenderness inside of her yet unexpressed in the waking world. The world of the American middle class may be a rotting facade, crushing inhabitants’ souls in their apathy, or as Groff puts it, forcing them “under the weight of that we wouldn’t or couldn’t yell” (p. 10) in a way superficially similar to the homeless that live under the bulk of their house, faces inches from the soles of their feet (p. 1), but the human life, that can be nourished. Just as the swans follow the impulse and cycle of nature to build again (p.10), mated for life, so too can the life of a person cycle into spring.

Paring this gloomy winter of the soul with the spring of renewal, Groff also parallels her turns of phrase, giving many of her symbolic figures double meanings. The swans lose part of their future with the deaths of their cygnets, and are already dressed for mourning in their black feathers (p.5), but they also begin again with the turn of the year. The water in the cold season runs down an icicle to plummet to the ground, death like, but it also represents beauty, and the building up of something new, i.e. the icicle (p. 1). The narrator mourns her past and perceived lost self as she mourns for the cygnets, sea turtles, and “hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species” (p. 5), both those of animals, and of people, be they the homeless burned out of their tent city in the forest, or the ungrateful suburbanites laboring behind their windows and “cracker” houses. Similarly, when she speaks of the weight she and her husband are “crouching under” (p. 10), it comes on the heels of her impulsive wish to “host” the homeless couple again before realizing it “is not a kind thing to tell human beings that they can live under your house” (p. 10), placing the two couples in direct parallel with each other, while also reminding the narrator of the privileges she does possess. All these paralleled meanings, aligned with the repetitive nature of a narrator circling the same few blocks multiple times a day, provides for a somewhat circular pacing, reminiscent of, well, pacing. Back and forth, block to block, past to future.

“These gorgeous changes that insist that not everything is decaying faster than we can love it” (p. 10) Groff writes, providing perhaps the most poignant of her parallels, that of change and growth, and thus her silver lining. So while, at first glance, Groff’s story seems a twin to Hempel’s it is actually a far more hopeful, inspiring, and encouraging piece, something which seems to thread throughout the other stories assigned to us this week.