Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Book Review: Lauren Groff - Florida

There were lots of aspects of these stories that I liked as I read them, but the collection as a whole didn't cohere into something I enjoyed until almost the very end when I was able to put them all together and get what she was trying to do. At first, each story ran together for me - if Florida Man is perpetually eating bath salts and driving four-wheelers into a swamp, then apparently Florida Woman is continually mired in unhappy relationships and snakes - but even though a notable percentage of these stories hit similar downbeats, each one conveys some bit of weird Florida-ness in a slightly different way. It might feel like the protagonists are mostly interchangeable, and they are, but as vessels for the emotions of disorientation, disillusion, and dislocation they're just fine. "Yport", the last, longest, and best story, doesn't even take place in Florida, but its narrative of a mother in a strange place trying to cope with several different flavors of disenchantment in her life and her work is a perfect example of how Groff is able to explore several things at once when she gives her ideas enough room to develop.

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