"Arcadia" by Lauren Groff

An audio book.

In the 1970s a group of people are trying to get Arcadia House ready, having lived in buses and lean-tos. When Handy leaves for a 3-month concert tour, Abe takes control and gets the big house finished. Bit, now 6, his son, was the first child born in the group. He's the main PoV. Hanna is Bit's mother. She gets depressed in the winter. There's no private ownership, more nudity and disability (mental because of drug abuse) than in society as a whole, and more tears. Survival is such a struggle that some people want to leave.

Bit roams and has lyrical insights. He watches his mother being washed by the other women and taken away to the house where she's talked to honestly until she's better. He can see her dreams. "lyrics stretched towards something fleeting". He slips into bed beside a woman giving birth. When he sees his parents cuddling he sees "the empty space that keeps the one from the other, the thing the size of a fist, a heart, a loaf, a rose, the size of his sister he'll never see" and starts crying silently.

By the time he's 14 his father is in a wheelchair (an accident when dealing with the sanitation), and isn't getting on well with Hanna (who's permanently on meds. An artist, Simon, says Hannah is his muse). Helicopters fly overheard. The commune decide to burn the hemp they've been growing and selling. Abe and Hanna have a hidden, secret field of it. Bit hasn't left the grounds - "the world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment." He's heard of televisions, "like tiny Plato's Caves".

The community has nudists, runaways, freeloaders, a tent for swingers, and trippers (people who've damaged themselves with drugs).

He fancies Hella, daughter of Handy (who's always had a soft spot for Bit). Abe allows the class he teaches to question Handy's authority - there's a "Council of 9" so why is Handy needed? On a night of celebrations there's a raid. About 200 people are arrested, a boy dies, and Handy's arrested for having sex with under-age girls. The commune falls apart. Bit and his family leave. Arcadia's converted to a mansion with tennis courts.

There's a jump of a few years. Bit got a Cornell degree, spent a year in Paris, had a few shows of his photographs, taught photography. He's anti-tech. At 35 he meets Hella again. They have a child, Greta. When Greta's 3, Hella disappears. His parents, separated, get together again, living near Arcadia. When Greta's 14. Hanna's 68 and dying. She and Abe have a suicide pact. Hanna survives. Bid looks after her. She refuses treatment. Covid arrives. Hanna tells Bid he's wasted his life helping people. He starts dating Hanna's doctor. Hanna dies, Astrid giving her a morphene overdose.

At one point the reader says "not even looking at the fraycas". My guess is that in the printed book the last word was "fracas".

Other reviews

• Kapka Kassabova (The requited maternal ecstasy the author feels for Bit, combined with turgid storytelling results in a novel that could be a one-page love poem, and in that sense feels 288 pages too long. I became incredulous after I'd heard 100 times that for little Bit, "everything is rich with the incredible" and "his heart is so loud it overwhelms the day". In the end, I felt as though I'd been on a numbing acid trip.)

"Florida" by Lauren Groff (William Heinemann, 2018)

Stories from New Yorker, etc, with stories in the BASS and PEN/O.Henry anthologies

• Ghosts and Empties - During her evening walks, a woman observes her area. "On my nighttime walks, the neighbours' lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums. At times, I'm the silent witness to fights that look like slow-dancing with music. It is astonishing how people live, the mess they sustain, the delicious whiffs of cooking that carry to the street, the holiday decorations that slowly seep into the daily decor". She's aware of social problems - she's invited a homeless couple to sleep under her house, and she reads about environmental crises. The story ends with "It is terribly true, even if the truth does not comfort, that if you look at the moon for long enough night after night, as I have, you will see that the old cartoons are correct, that the moon is, in fact, laughing. But it is not laughing at us, we lonely humans, who are far too small and our lives far too fleeting for it to give us any notice at all".
• At the round Earth's imagined corners - Jude lived in a house surrounded by swampland. He likes science, maths and being alone. When his mother "was pregnant with Jude's sister, she came into the bathroom to take a cool bath one August night and, without her glasses, missed the three-foot albino alligator her husband had stored in the bathtub. The next morning she was gone. She returned a week later. And after Jude's sister was born dead, a perfect petal of a baby, his mother never stopped singing under her breath". Later she leaves permanently. His father dies of snake-bites. Then he hears that his mother's dead. "There was nothing but numbers then. Later, there would be numbers but also the great ravishing machine in the laboratory into which Jude fed punched slips of paper and the motorcycle he rode because it roared like murder. He had been given a class to teach, but it was taken away after a month and he was told that he was better suited for research". He walks into traffic, is cared for by a Good Samaritan, marries her. They return to his reptile-infested house. The nearby university is encroaching, wanting to buy them out. They have a daughter. He goes deaf. While his wife is driving their daughter to university he gets stranded in a rowing boat on their alligator-infested lake, oarless. He fears death by sun-stroke. The winds rise and he drifts to the shore as his wife arrives a day earlier than expected. At the end "He stepped closer to her and put his head in the crook of her neck and breathed his inadequacy out there, breathed in her love and the grease of her travels and knew he had been lucky, and that he had escaped the hungry dark once more". The style is that of Fable though it's nearly 30 pages long.
• Dogs go wolf - Girls of 4 and 7 are taken by their mother and her boyfriend to a little island, then left. Then another couple, Melanie and Smokey Joe, leave. The girls are alone. They're used to it. They run out of gas, then water, then food. There's a pool at the centre of the island. A man comes. They hide from him. A woman plus her man comes. The girls let themselves be saved by her. One becomes a lawyer.
• The midnight zone - A couple with 2 young boys are in a hut 20 miles from safety. The husband goes away for a day or so. The mother falls, suffers concussion. The boys look after her, telling her stories. Batteries run out. Dangerous animals are outside. The husband returns.
• Eyewall - A hurricane is on its way. "At first, though, little happens. The lake goose-bumped; I might have been looking at the sensitive flesh of an enormous lizard. The swing in the oak made larger arcs over the water. The palmettos nodded, accepting the dance". Her husband, twice her age, is having an affair. She decides to stay put, taking 2 bottle of wine to the bathroom. "I have always felt a sisterhood with bathtubs; without someone else within us, we are smooth white cups of nothing". She recalls diving in a sunken village - "I saw a catfish lying on a platter in the dining room as if serving himself up ... I saw sheets forgotten on the line, waving upwards towards the sun". She hallucinates, talks with her dead father. "Well, he said. There will always be another storm, you know". At the end, when the win's subsided, "Houses contain us; who can say what we contain? Out where the steps had been, balanced beside the drop-ff: one egg, whole and mute, holding all the light of dawn in its skin".
• For the god of love, for the love of god - Grant and Amanda are staying with Manfred and Genevieve who've a clever/strange son, Leo, aged 4. Manfred and Genevieve used to be rich. Grant's about to leave Amanda though so doesn't know yet. Mina arrives to mind Leo. She, by contrast, is excited by the future. The weakest piece so far.
• Salvador - a woman who's her mother's carer goes on a month's holiday per year, picking up men of boys most nights. The time the grocer opposite is ogling her. When she gets caught in a storm he grabs/save her off the street and locks her in a back room with no light. He gets drunk. At the end he falls asleep. She can escape but first "She piled the items gently in his arms. And when he didn't move, she stooped to collect more: pens, cookies, a head of bananas. One perfect orange, its pores even and clean."
• Flower hunters - It's Halloween. A mother's staying in while the father and 2 sons are out. She fears sink holes. Her best friend down the road wants a break from her. "She says to her dog, who is beside her at the window watching the candle man, One day you'll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud. The dog ignores her, because the dog is wise". She's reading a book about an naturalist, Bartram, and loves him. "She thinks of Bartram in the deep semitropical forest, far from his wife, aroused by the sight of an evocative blue flower that exists as a weed in her own garden, writing, in what is surely a double entendre or, if not, deeply Freudian: How fantastical looks the libertine Clitoria, mantling the shrubs, in the vistas skirting the groves! This, this is what she loves in Bartram so much! The way he lets himself be full animal, a sensualist, the way he finds glory in the body's hungers and delights."
• Above and below - A girl leaves a relationship, taking all she has in her car, sleeping in it. She's soon penniless. The car gets vandalised, her possessions stolen. There's a hurricane. She ends up in a squat. A long story that didn't do much for me.
• Snake stories - Rather inconsequential.
• Yport - The first paragraph is "The mother decides to take her two young sons to France for August" - to avoid the Florida heat and, allegedly, to research Guy de Maupassant. When 18 she stayed there for a year and became a different person. Her marriage isn't doing too well. The boys are 4 and 6. Alas, they don't pick up French by osmosis, and Paris is hot. The seaside is too cold. We learn quite a lot about Guy at the mother tries to keep the boys occupied. She drinks. At the end of this readable though rather slight piece, they all express a dislike of Guy and plan to go home.

Nature is dangerous. People are abandoned by others, one by one. Children are in pairs, nameless. Pet dogs may be dangerous.

Other reviews

• Lauren Elkin (Groff’s lyrical and oblique stories catch these women in the midst of becoming aware of their complicity in perpetuating these narratives – to which their response is to walk, flee, or conversely refuse to budge)
• Katy Waldman (As each story in “Florida” begins, select components from the same elemental scenario appear: a protagonist is imperilled by a weather event, an injury, or some other extremity ... Groff has always been a sentence-level writer, and the sentences indigenous to “Florida” are gorgeously weird and limber. The lit windows of neighbors are “domestic aquariums.”)
• Lisa Zeidner (Her morose protagonists drink too much wine as they fret about everything from global warming to the daily hazards confronting their vulnerable children. Indeed, nothing seems to get Groff’s imagination soaring like the mistreatment of a minor ... Several of the stories concern a writer who, like Groff herself, lives in Florida and has two young sons. The stories that remain in the safety of the upper middle class (“Privilege. Sorry,” one woman jokes ) are weaker and tend to run together ... While these stories don’t always achieve the psychological depth of Groff’s novels, there’s serious pleasure to be had in her precise descriptions of landscape)
• Kirkus review (Even the few stories that dribble off rather than end, such as “For the God of Love, For the Love of God,” have passages of surpassing beauty. And Groff gets the humid, pervasive white racism that isn’t her point but curdles through plenty of her characters.)
• Aleksandra Burshteyn (Groff’s eleven stories are largely in third person, and only three feature protagonists with names. ... This eerie egg is one of three round objects Groff ends a story on—the others being a peach and an orange. There are other repetitive, recursive images and tropes that structure the stories: two boys, one dark, one fair; a lonely and bookish mother; illuminating lightning strikes; out-of-body experiences; absent or golden husbands; sudden storms; nameless female narrators; gnawing anxiety about climate change. Alongside her matter-of-fact grip on the surreal, these are the tools of a tradition older than the realist fiction novel—the fairy tale.)

"Delicate edible birds" by Lauren Groff (William Heinemann, 2009)

Stories from Glimmer Train, The Atlantic, etc.

"Lucky Chow Fun" is livened up by the interjected search for an appropriate fairy tale template. In "L. DeBard and Aliette" there are more swimmers, one of them a poet - "L. comes home from the hospital on the day his new book sells out in one hour." "Majorette" has another young mother. "Blythe" is about 2 mothers who join a poetry group - Harriet's plain (she'll eventually get a Ph.D and write theory), and Blythe's beautiful (but has a history of suicide attempts. She becomes an outrageous performance artist). Harriet feels responsible for Blythe's safety, but gets a job in London just when Blythe's husband feels he can't cope any more. "The Wife of the Dictator" has more mothers sitting around swimming pools, and another woman who attracts attention. More bruised eyes. It has the feel of allegory/fable.

"Watershed" is my favourite so far. The packaged anecdotes are interesting in themselves, and the time-flow is less linear. Stories are retold, changed - "Because I had nothing to do, I finally began to understand the rhythm of the village, its subtleties that I had been too impatient to recognize when I was young.
Are you happy here? my mother said once in April, pouring coffee into my cup. I don't mean with him, she said, nodding toward the living room, where you and my father were shouting at some sports team thousands of miles away. But here?" (p.178).

In "Sir Fleeting", Nana's story of her life is punctuated by recalled encounters with Ancel de Chair who turns up for the last time, and with effect, at the end. My second favourite story.

"Fugue" switches between settings, the names of the troubled characters not always clear. The one character whose life-story is linearly recounted has the most mixed-up life.

I've read "Delicate Edible Birds" before, and liked it. As with "Sir Fleeting", a woman comes to a moral decision. In this case war journalists are fleeing from WW2 Paris - "Because it had rained and the rain had caught the black soot of the factories as they burned, Paris in the dark seemed covered by a dusky skin, almost as though it were living. The arches in the facades were the curves of a throat, the street corners elbows."

She likes page-long lyrical endings, a final change of gear.

Other reviews

• Kirkus Review
• Claire Hopley (What distinguishes her from most of her fellow MFAs who succeed in the difficult task of getting a first novel published, is her sense of life as a braid of emotions, ambitions, constraints and surprises that ties everyone in place)
• Christina Clarkson (With most of the stories around 40 pages, each is more akin to a novella, and they often span a significant amount of time. All of the stories focus on women who fit the “delicate, edible bird” description with their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. While a few of the stories stand out because of their compelling sense of place and character, several are held back from being great by characters that never materialize into anything more than hazy sketches.)
• Ann Robinson