The National Book Award announced its longlist for its 2018 fiction prize last week, and among the ten titles was Florida, the new short story collection from Lauren Groff. She was previously nominated for the same honor for her 2015 novel Fates and Furies, which earned widespread critical acclaim and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Florida is a good bit shorter and showcases Groff’s ability to craft a compelling narrative in just a handful of pages, with the typical inconsistency of most short story collections but some standouts that rank among the best things I’ve read all year.
The stories in Florida are connected only by that state, which is the setting for most of them and the place of origin for central characters in the others, with recurring themes across stories like the pernicious effects of climate change (including the existential fears it causes for various characters), physical or metaphorical sinkholes, or growing income disparity in a state often associated with ostentatious wealth. Groff paints a grim portrait of the state’s present and its future in stories that range from psychological horror to pleas for empathy, turning the so-called “Sunshine State” into a vaguely menacing and often depressing backdrop for stories of lives gone awry.
The other true standout in the collection is “Dogs Go Wolf,” which reads like a horror story, with two young girls left alone in an island cabin by their mother who may be off partying (although as with most off-screen details in Florida, Groff leaves much of this ambiguous) while a storm approaches and the girls’ supplies start to dwindle. They’re young enough to be scared of imminent threats but probably should be more scared about who’s going to rescue them, and manage to keep themselves feeling somewhat safe by telling each other stories – a theme, that stories can nourish and comfort us, that recurs throughout the novel in all manner of settings.
One maddening aspect of Florida is Groff’s insistence on leaving characters without names. Once in a while, it can be a clever rhetorical device, something that helps make a story seem more universal, or that can emphasize the dehumanizing experiences a character undergoes, but when every story has the same feature, it begins to feel like affect rather than a purposeful decision on the part of the author. The opening and closing stories appear to include the same central character, a woman who in the first part is trying to avoid making a scene at home after dinner and in the second has her two young sons with her on a quixotic working vacation to research Guy de Maupassant in France, but she’s also one of the least sympathetic figures in the entire collection, someone who hamstrings herself with questionable choices and rash decisions, and even in 70-plus pages featuring her, the reasons for her odd behavior are never made clear.
I haven’t read any other nominees for the National Book Award yet, so I have no idea where Florida might rank, but I do expect to see it come up frequently in best-of-2018 lists given its quality and Groff’s history. It’s certainly miles ahead of the latest Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, the forgettable novel Less, with stories here that will stay with me for months, and a hazy, sluggish atmosphere throughout the collection that left me feeling dazed the way a humid summer day in Florida itself would.
Next up: Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.