Florida by Lauren Groff

Still, what would bright-eyed Puc-Puggy have seen of Florida before the automobile, before the airplane, before the planned communities, before the swarms of Mouseketeers?

A damp, dense tangle.

An Eden of dangerous things.

Lauren Groff's Florida isn't the Florida of Disneyworld or Sea World or strip malls or even South Beach: it's a kind of primeval jungle that lurks at the edge of civilization and threatens constantly to overtake it.  It's the snake- and reptile-collecting hobby of the brutish father in the story "At the Earth's Round Imagined Corners."  In these stories dogs are always wandering and off and going wild, as the title of "Dogs Go Wolf" implies, and children too, when they're abandoned on an island in the keys.  A panther prowls through the cover and past the cabin of "The Midnight Zone."  And eventually, the stories abandon Florida, stretching out to Brazil and France (twice), though even the main character of "Yport" admits that "[o]f all teh places in the world, she belongs in Florida.  How dispiriting, to learn this of herself."  She needn't feel embarrassed; it's the old and crumbling civilization of the Normandy coast that doesn't quite measure up to the allure of Floridian wildness.

The protagonists of Groff's stories tend to be disaffected women.  Some are mothers, one is a caretaker for her own mother, but they run the gamut from mildly to deeply unhappy.  The narrator of "Ghosts and Empties" gives an account of the landscape she jogs through because she can't bear to consider the unhappiness of her own marriage.  They imagine intimate relationships instead with historical men: In "Flower Hunters," it's early Florida explorer William Bartram; in "Yport," it's Guy de Maupassant.

Their disaffected nature leads to a kind of paralysis that gets unfortunately reproduced in the narrative.  "Ghosts and Empties" is the worst offender, a slice of Floridian atmosphere that goes around and around like the jogger-narrator, and I thought it was an unfortunate opener for the collection.  But you see it also in "Above and Below," in which the narrator whose acedia is so strong she drops purposefully out of polite society and into homelessness, and "Salvador," which begins with an interesting premise--a woman visiting Brazil by herself is caught in a vicious rainstorm, where she is saved by a local who may or may not have sexual designs on her--but descends into a wan fever dream.  Better is "For the God of Love, for the Love of God," which, while a little bit overstuffed, manages to tell a tight little story about adultery and alienation among four friends in a chalet outside of Paris.

There are some inspired moments here.  I liked especially the moment in "The Midnight Zone" in which the mother-figure, having received a dangerous blow to the head without a way to get to a hospital, imagines herself projected into the panther slinking outside.  My favorite is probably "Snake Stories," a bloodred little story that uses the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and its Floridian descendants, as a metaphor for rape.  But most of the stories left me wanting more: a little more danger rather and less threat of danger, a few more snakes.