BRAWLER: Stories, by Lauren Groff
Some practitioners of the short story, a form in flux that’s suffered since the erosion of magazines, are praised for their polish and compactness. Lauren Groff produces rough beasts that slouch off in unexpected directions and spawn. There’s often a little story within the story, a joey in a marsupial pouch.
Groff is one of this country’s most successful and versatile literary figures. She’s a hardy survivor of those shudder-inducing under-40 lists, best seller, perennial prize contender and one of a dozen or so Ann Patchett apostles: authors who own bookstores. Her last two novels time-traveled like some supercharged Martha McFly, one to colonial America (she wrote a draft in iambic pentameter “for fun”); the other to 12th-century France.
“Brawler” is her third collection of stories. There are nine of them, like the “Nine Stories” volumes published by both Nabokov and Salinger. Most of hers, like Salinger’s, were first published in The New Yorker; they seem like a homecoming, and honestly, something of a relief. If they have a shared theme, it is how the bedrock of family crumbles, and its members are forced to shift into new formations, occasionally tectonic.
The stories are folksy, a little retro and sensual, with multiple dips into earthy, furtive lesbian lust: the buzz-cut gardening instructor who teaches a depressed perimenopausal wife about compost, and flirts; the mother named Anais who escaped domestic abuse, mainlines turmeric and leans in for a smelly kiss; teenage fumblings on a green shag carpet.
Most delightful is “Birdie,” about a quartet of female friends, that magic number that has sustained many a television series. The women are drinking peach schnapps, but this is no frivolous brunch; the title character is in bed, dying from cancer. They are discussing the worst things they’ve ever done. (Even the areligious among us know the answer to this, and on some level fear the consequences.)
Nic, Birdie’s closest friend, describes how she broke up the couple she babysat for at age 17. The reader is beckoned into the whole atmosphere of that household, where under the spell of a deeply inappropriate but intoxicating sexual awakening, “a tomato was no longer just a tomato but something bigger and more beautiful.”
We briefly move to Nic’s troubled household of origin, before returning to the hospital room and a secret shared there that Birdie will take to her grave. Then to the “desiccated peas on the kitchen tiles” of the house where Nic, divorced now herself, lives with her daughter. Lifting your head you realize you’ve covered three generations of female trauma in fewer than 30 pages: a pocket epic.
The most haunting story — while we’re handing out yearbook superlatives — is “To Sunland,” set in the 1950s, about a sister dropping off her intellectually disabled older brother at an institution before she heads to college. Their mother has died recently, and the siblings are perceiving and grieving this differently, but there’s continuity as we encounter a thief, a sexual opportunist and the women in white who seem to the brother like they could be emissaries from heaven.
Second most haunting: the little girl, Aura, of “Such Small Islands.” Neglected by the half sister who’s supposed to be watching but is preoccupied with her boyfriend, she hides in the caves as the authorities search. (“No child can be evil, but evil can thrive inside a child,” Groff writes in brief endnotes.)
Most destined to be a classic: “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?,” which follows a young boy named Chip from an Independence Day celebration with his WASPy banking family all the way to his alcoholism and eventual affair with one of the adult guests. It ends with a pow.
The title story itself might be the weakest, or least finished, of the bunch. “I became a writer because I was a swimmer,” Groff writes in her endnotes, intrigued, too, by the bravado of divers, who seemed “half birds, half fish.”
Here she depicts a mysteriously truculent young diver, Sara, in an afternoon at the pool. There is, it turns out, trouble at home — her mother is bed-bound and “drank nothing but vodka now; it killed the germs, she said.” The whole swimming pool setup — perhaps the ultimate short-story setup! — dribbles and drains into nothing.
The stories in “Brawler” are, again, rough, in all senses of the word. Upsetting; uneven. But “no writer worth his salt is even, or can be,” Eudora Welty wrote, reviewing Salinger’s lonely nine in these pages. And Groff is spilling so much salt right now, Morton should give her a jingle.
BRAWLER: Stories | By Lauren Groff | Riverhead | 288 pp. | $29
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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