Okay, so digging into Florida this week I was a little skeptical. I love short story collections, but sometimes they leave me feeling like I've lost something. I'm dropped into these worlds where more questions than answers are raised. But, with that being said, I was pleasantly surprised here. I had my eye roll moment - the good white lady living around all those not-so-bad Black people; the overweight Black woman (we had to know she was Black) and the brown cleaning man just to name a few - but I still felt like these tales had an 'everyman' (woman) quality about them. Not to mention that each sentence Groff writes is packed with a punch. Short stories don't have much room to create an impact and Groff makes sure each one counts while also creating patterns with their cyclical structures.
In 'Ghost and Empties', we follow the unnamed female narrator as she catalogs her neighborhood each season. The sentences are long, dense, and packed with information. Lots of commas to keep piling the information Groff is throwing our way. Take the opening for example, there are six commas. The sentence piles on itself. She's a woman who yells and the sentence is bookmarked by a man who does not yell. Not only does the sentence drag, building on the narrator's anxiety, but it also gives us what we need to know about the narrator's relationship. Even when we get the detail that she's seen something on her husband's computer to warrant suspicion, we've already got the background information on the narrator and her husband. Groff's syntax mimics the content and builds suspense.
Groff also does this thing where she messes with the timeline and withholds somewhat necessary details, too. In 'Dogs Go Wolf', we're presented with two sisters abandoned by their mother and left to battle a foreign terrain. We don't know how far inland they are, where their mother went (or even that they have a mother until a few pages in). What we also see too, is two sisters telling and stories that are often muddled and retold on the spot conflated with future renderings of the girls' futures and what we can describe as current day. The sentence lengths her differentiate between girls, but still mimics the amount of information girls below ten can hold. When we stray towards future memories? wanderings? of the older sister thinking of her young sister's marriage, the sentences are again longer, filled with more.
'Above and Below' again varies in sentence length. It was also the lease palpable of the three tales for me. I wondered why and on the second read through realised its because that's how its meant to feel. The pacing, encouraged by the sentences and the content, are meant to feel cyclical, tiring, and oppressive. We're again with this unnamed woman whose frustration with the world is turned inwards and plagues her into this . . . nothingness where she struggles to make sense of anything. Again some details are withheld from us -- why does she hate her step-father so much; does it have something to do with the fact that her mother lowers her voice when he enters the room? why won't she go home?
Each tale is unflinching in its pacing, dragging us along to mimic anxiety, fear & confusion, and hopelessness. They're an unflinching portrait of economics, the unsaid, and the downs of life (with some lights at the end of the tunnel). All set in America's pain in the ass Florida. Well, at least none of them revolved around the infamous Florida Man.
i too was aware of her color lens and also my lens on white women who choose homelessness and poverty, although they can read Middlemarch and Paradise Lost. It's interesting to try to accept this as her liberation or iteration. I agree however, there is a rigor to the writing is loaded.
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I really like how you articulated the way the syntax evokes certain emotions from us as readers - while I was reading I was trying to figure out what exactly it was that kept drawing me along with these characters since (at least in "Ghosts and Empties" and "Above and Below") there wasn't a ton of outside action that we directly experienced to create the sense of unease and anxiety that more action-packed scenes would do in other stories.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, I wonder if short stories tend to be overall more "artful" than novels sense they don't have as much space to make us buy in to the characters and events of each story. Not to say that novels aren't or can't be artful, but more that there's more demand that short stories need to be and each sentence has to do the work with not as much room for tangents.
I think how the author plays with the timelines of her stories interested me the most, she makes some unusual decisions, especially in Dogs Go Wolf, that surprised me.
ReplyDeleteI didn't notice how long the sentences are in the first story, that makes a lot of sense, since she's struggling with something and can't let it go. I also like how you point out the different sentences lengths in Dogs Go Wolf, it's a nice way to indicate age and attention span.
It's really difficult to get away with not explaining everything in a story, like the stepfather, but I didn't notice that exact piece was missing. I wonder how it would have changed the story, and my sympathy for the character, if that had been included.