Characters That Are Salvageable

Lauren Groff loves marital discord, brushes with death, storms, European holiday, and unlikable, lonely narrators. She weaves comfortable threads through all the stories that reappear as you read along. Struck by the desperation and upheaval that characterized several narrators' lives, so alone even when around other people. The solitude of the unliked and the unwell appears and reappears with different hats on, whether it is the boy Jude or the nameless girl featured in Above and Below. Coming back to and repeating themes is an element of craft that feels invisible, since the themes aren't necessarily the hedging aspects of these stories. Groff's Florida is full of near-survival, even for the housewife in The Midnight Zone vomiting on herself in a swampside cabin, or the two tiny girls in Dogs Go Wolf who are left to starve by possible drug dealers, possible murderers. The self-sufficience of these characters is the nobel arc, seeing them through survival against odds of rape, kidnapping, being washed away by a storm, being eaten by an alligator or a dog, or being forgotten.
One particularly striking moment for me was in Above and Below, when the girl surrenders Jane's children to Family Services. Here is a character who has endured the elements, nearly starved, very at the end of her capacity, finally finding a limit to what she can do. It's sad and it's life affirming, even as she backs out of the police station, that she can claim that much of herself back. Groff's characters embody this dimension of near-limit in most cases, finding the "edge", whether it is within the body or the outskirts of the mind. Groff reserves the most brutal circumstances for women, her men characters have less to grapple with. Yet they do not lack the multiplicity of recognized failure, as Grant in For the God of Love, For the Love of God confesses his plan to leave Amanda to Manfred in the Fiat under the pounding rain. He knows this is a weakness to let out this information to someone he hardly knows and certainly doesn't trust, who has also just let on that he likes his wife. But there is a hardiness in being free once you've scraped the bottom and found there's nowhere to go but up.
I loved how Groff describes the settings of these stories, having lived in Gainesville myself, I was taken back to the insect-ridden swampland with the heat and the danger and the Spanish Moss hanging from every tree. The alligators of my memory hung near. The settings of these stories are characters themselves, the swamp in At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners takes on its own life quite drastically, itself a possible murderer that Jude has somehow knowingly toyed with in his solo trip in the boat he doesn't know how to operate. The snakes, the gators, the temperature, the sunburn, and the mosquito onslaught all pulse off the page in this piece.
It's so well written that I'm always surprised when a story ends, even if I agree and acquiesce to the last sentences, because it doesn't need to continue though I would be happy for it to. Some of the characters are still salvageable, or have room for redemption that isn't quite imminent when the piece dispels. What's left for our imagination as readers is an open road.