Pacing Mimics Plot in Florida

Ghosts and Empties:

The narrator is obsessively observant, and the pace moves quickly, never sinking fully into flashback, meditative thought, or any real self-analysis. This reminds me of the pace of speed-walking… which is to say, it’s not too fast to savor, but it is too slow to let life rush over you and not analyze. I liked that this pacing matched the psychological issues of the narrator (sorry, but not really sorry, I can’t help but wish I was a psychologist all the time). She is willfully ignoring her husband’s adultery. She chooses to speed-walk (not run) away from her problems. She avoids. She distances herself from pain, and therefore, from healing. To me, this piece feels like it holds the tone of someone just before a breakdown… where all the pieces are there, poised to drop. The narrator knows the facts of her life, but just needs to suspend them for one more day. I felt this in the tone of acute observation… always pivoting from one delicious people-watching moment to the next.

Dogs Go Wolf:

The form of this reminds me of a fairy tale, which seems fitting because it is in the voice of the oldest child, who is seven. She is also telling a fairy tale to her younger child.

The narrator recalls dialogue of the adults without judgement or even deep understanding. Yes, the mother wears blue eye makeup. Yes, she swears and she gets mad, but the narrator doesn’t judge. Things are just happening to her. The fact that she is a child taking in her world as it happens allows the reader to accept the information at face value as well.

Just when I felt the most panic of the piece, when the older sister is so lethargic that she just lets a mosquito bite her and pump out blood (page 63), Groff gives the end away:

“It was all so much. Through the years to come, she’d remember these days of calm. She’d hold these beautiful soft days in her as the years slowly moved from terrible to bearable to better, and she would feel herself growing, sharpening.”

As a reader, I still had the taste of foreshadowing in my mouth from when the older sister told the story about eating people to her younger sibling. I thought this flash-forward was going to be a moment where the older sister reckons with having eaten her dead sister’s body… dark, I know. But I fully expected something different. This flash-forward built tension while it simultaneously broke it (because we knew from that point on that the girls would be ok).

I think this flash-forward works in the span of a short story… in a way, the existence of more time gives the piece more “bulk.” I’m not saying it well at ALL, but this moment could have been a jumping point for the piece to become a novel, if Groff wanted to. Instead, she curbed the tension. When all was hopeless, she gave hope and was able to spin the ending in a way that would have felt sudden and contrived without the reader expecting it. She made us aware that she was about to end, so it worked. The ending was earned.

Above and Below:

Real, too real. I notice the presence of starvation in this piece and Dogs Go Wolf. It was an embodied starvation, one that seeped into the tone and voice of narration. The rhythm accelerates when the nameless protagonist finally eats in that boy’s apartment (page 180): “She ate a slice of cold pizza standing in the glow, opened a jar of pickles and ate three, ripped a hunk of cheddar from the block with her fingers and gobbled it down. She didn’t see the boy standing in the doorway until she reached for the orange juice.” We get NONE of the pleasure of her eating after all this time. She is ravenous and eats with a reckless randomness that takes place in a short span of time. We don’t feel her satisfaction… only her shame.

Since I think we’re talking about mapping the short story movement, I noticed that the story moved from event to event -- living on the beach, to sleeping in car and getting caught by cop, to sleeping with the boy who had food in his fridge, to eating at a church and watching a lovely scene of server comforting a woman eating, to the cop rapping on the window of her car, to working for Eugene-Euclean, to losing everything when her car was destroyed and scavenged, to moving into the Prairie home -- while there was an undercurrent of worry for her mother that seeped into moments throughout. She was always on the run, similar to the other two pieces we’ve read… there is a survival aspect to all three.

I would say that survival in Ghosts and Empties hinges on self-denial through acute observation of others - denial as a mechanism of protection. In a way, the narrator has just enough of a window into herself for to keep denying her feelings for just a bit longer.

Survival in Dogs Go Wolf is rooted in innocence and vulnerability… it is the quality of childhood that both endangers and protects the older and younger sisters. They are able to play and be nonchalant while their lives crumble and their situation becomes more and more dire, which probably prevents them from panicking and making a dumb decision. The fairy tale form(?) pairs well with their childlike, survival via going-with-the-flow existence.

In Above and Below, the protagonist's survival hinges on the adrenaline of being sick (eating disorder), and being lost. The protagonist floats like a leaf along life’s stream, rushed along by complete, whole-body pain. But she hasn't given up, or else why would she wait in line at soup kitchens? Again, the pacing of this piece mimics the plot... the event-to-event nature of this story is just like someone who is out of control... things keep happening and stacking on top of one another. The protagonist strikes me as depressed and in the throes of an eating disorder that was complemented by her situation of homelessness. The impetus to survive propels her to find food and sustenance, but only after she is tanned and experiences “mild starvation” as she puts it. Oh -- I also notice that she’s obsessed with the bodies of others; on page 175, she refers to the women at the gym as having “bellies and thighs larded by their easy lives.” I would say she's controlling her body because she can't control her life. She does not even possess a name.

Side note, not sure how this relates to craft: there is also a striking awareness of body in the first piece, Ghosts and Empties, where she comments on the weight of the neighbor boy and how his stomach looks like a rock rippling through a pond as he works out… because all I had as a reader are the details of her observation, I feel like I am complicit in those observations.... and some feel particularly cruel. To be fair, I get that she's a hurt person giving us these details... so is that what's craft-y about it? I'd love to put better words to this.