Published: October 01. 2009 2:00AM
Reviewed by Ashley Warlick
If a short story by its nature is a sleek thing, pared to the bone, Lauren Groff is writing some kind of long distance swimmer of a story, a body well-made and well-used, fattened up for endurance, its energy perfectly spent at its task. As lush and symphonic as any novel, Delicate Edible Birds heralds a presence in the form that runs counter to what we think of when we think of short fiction. God bless Lauren Groff, and her beautiful, voluptuous work.
“Lucky Chow Fun,” the collection’s first story is about just this swimmer, plump and powerful, the fastest butterflier in Templeton and captain of the Varsity boys swim team. Lottie keeps watch over her eccentric sister, Pot, in the wake of her parents’ divorce and her mother’s new love with The Garbageman, but what will happen when and if she gets the scholarship she’s waiting for? The darker scandal that comes to bear in Lottie’s world only serves to underscore the central tension here, a thread that runs throughout the collection: for better or worse, Groff’s women labor under the consequences of need.
There is power to be found in need, of course. And page by page, Groff reveals it freshly.
The nine stories in this collection are very much about American women, at home and abroad, in our time and past, under various political sun and shadow. The traditional milestones of weddings and births attend these stories, but these women are also poets and majorettes, collectors of taxidermy, psychopathic performance artists, delicate lusty survivors of polio, women of peculiar determination all their own. They marry dictators as easily as next-door neighbors, marry two and three times wrong, bear children that orbit them or children they almost neglect. They make homes and families in the midst of other avocations, and so the tension in their lives is instantly familiar. They need and are needed, everywhere.
It’s not a tension Groff limits to the twenty-first century. She locates her characters in post-war New York and France, in small Pennsylvania towns and New England villages. Many of these stories happen over lifetimes, histories revealed with what often feels like a retrospective pace and tone. Even the smallest of choices ripples through generations. In “L. DeBard and Aliette,” a moment of physical weakness leads a sheltered New York heiress to leave her son with his immigrant father, a separation that becomes permanent under her father’s wrath, but with which her son finds a freedom she could never know. In “Majorette,” the beautiful daughter of a beauty queen burns herself in a fire baton accident. Recovering in the hospital, she picks up a book and changes the course of her life, and consequently, that of her own daughter.
Some of Groff’s women craft their own stories. In “Sir Fleeting,” a grandmother casts back over her decades-long lust for a dashing Frenchman she met on her first honeymoon in Argentina. In “Watershed,” the narrator is a professional storyteller speaking intimately, nearly whispering, to her dead husband the story of their brief marriage. But it’s the title story where Groff brings this control to bear most devastatingly; in the occupied French countryside, a maverick war correspondent bargains her body for the lives of the four men held prisoner with her, relenting only when the man who loves her turns away. Groff is intent upon casting traditional roles in a far from conventional light, and in that, finding a whole new currency between the sexes. And strong new forms for our heroines.
Lauren Groff will be reading from her work, along with Spartanburg writer Deno Trakas, as part of the Emrys Reading Room, Monday October 26th, 7PM, at the Handlebar, 304 East Stone Avenue.