The Nature of Things

I'm really not a fan of the short story and I seldom read them, but, of course, I would make an exception for the author of Fates and Furies , one of my absolute favorite books from recent years. Groff's latest book, Florida , is, in fact, a collection of short stories, not all of them set in Florida, but all of them have a Florida connection and they have the Florida atmosphere - heavy, oppressive heat that infuses a sense of dread. The atmosphere in all of the stories is experienced by a series of women characters, and yet, in a larger sense, they all seem to be the same woman. This woman is alone. She is single, in some cases a single mother usually of two children, or she may be married but, for some reason, the husband is generally out of the picture. Events are experienced through her eyes and her emotions alone.  The woman has no name but she is furious (somehow recalling Mathilde of Fates and Furies ). She is furious about the way we live, the abundance and waste, the a...

Fates and Furies: A Novel by Lauren Groff My rating: 5 of 5 stars Lauren Groff was born in Cooperstown, New York and grew up near the Baseball Hall of Fame. I thought about that as I was considering how I would sum up my thoughts about her latest book. I think she has written the story of a man who was born on third base and thinks he's hit a home run, and his wife, a woman who knows that you have to learn to bunt and run out those bunts, then steal second base, third base, and be prepared to go home when the flustered pitcher makes a wild pitch. This is a remarkable story of a marriage, but the marriage is just a vehicle for getting into the nature of human existence, a way to explore philosophical truths as revealed by mundane events. Baseball is sometimes seen as a metaphor for life; here, marriage is the metaphor for life. The book is divided into two parts, as the title might suggest. The first part, the Fates , is Lancelot (Lotto) Satterwhite's story. Is it coincidental ...

Do you ever have the experience of starting to read a new book and after a few pages you feel as if you've stepped through the looking glass into an alternative universe? And once you've stepped through, you feel like you never want to go back again? That was the way I felt about this book. It had me from the first sentence, "The women in the river, singing." And it didn't let go until that last paragraph: "He sits. He lets the afternoon sink in. The sweetness of the soil rises to him. A squirrel scolds from high in a tree. The city is still far away, full of good people going home. In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world." All has not been well in the world for quite a while as this story ends in the dystopian landscape of pandemics and global warming run amok in 2018. But the story didn't start there. It started back in the mid 1960s in idyllic upstate New York as a group of idealistic hippies a...