In a recent review of Richard Powers’s The Overstory, we described how the overtly didactic nature of the novel raises an important question at the heart of activism and social change. Driven by the unfolding climate disaster, Powers takes a William Lloyd Garrison-style approach, not once equivocating or excusing, refusing to retreat a single inch in his conviction that we are destroying the planet and doing nothing to save it. However, no matter how truthful and urgent his position, the tone can still be classified as uncomfortably polemical, as though taking such a forthright and uncomplicated view of something—even our own impending doom—is naive and childlike. But that might just be The Overstory‘s greatest success. Perhaps subtlety and sophistication have no place in this fight? As we continued in the piece:
Powers refuses to be silenced, which translates to a lot of (intentionally) heavy-handed dendrological metaphors, a lot of (non-ironic) talk of rediscovering the beauty of nature and much (sincere) discussion of how humans are terrible and short-sighted and doomed in the way of a Greek tragedy. Essentially, a lot of trees. However, the fact that such a premise feels tiring, and the metaphors ham-fisted, and the views unsophisticated only confirms Powers’ point. There’s nothing hip or trendy about this message. There is no cultural capital to be earned, no badges of honour to wear, no quick redemption to cash in at the next available opportunity.
The problem with such a blunt method of writing is that it will not work for everyone. Being whacked over the head with our own lunacy might cause the already convinced to sit up and take more immediate action, but is likely to turn away many more who feel undeserving of such a beating. Which means, with complete admiration for Powers’s efforts, there is still a need for subtlety and nuance.
Lauren Groff’s latest short story collection Florida represents one of the best examples of this alternate take on climate fiction. Whereas The Overstory presents nature as a central character and climate change as a capitalised THEME, Groff instead presents them in a more natural way, just as much a fact of life in her vision of Florida as the characters themselves, despite no explicit pontificating on the subject. Importantly, the nuance here is not so-called ‘balance’ where opposing views are given airtime. Climate change is still happening. Things are still bad and getting worse, and still no-one is acting quickly or substantially enough. The difference is in the tone of communicating this, and the manner in which Groff positions herself in relation to the audience. If Richard Powers in a teacher or priest, warning of an approaching damnation, then Lauren Groff is a next-door neighbour, going through it with you.
Though the feeling is only occasionally born of direct fears around the climate, the prevailing atmosphere in Florida is one of dread. Large killer cats stalk the treeline (‘The Midnight Zone’), sinkholes open up beneath foundations (‘Flower Hunter’), hurricanes blow gators, gar and ghosts directly into people’s houses (‘Eyewall’). People are just as threatening, such as the strange shopkeeper of ‘Salvador’, or the herpetologist father of ‘At the Round of Earth’s Imagined Corners’ who brings up his son in a house of venomous snakes. However, the creatures of the latter are not so much the primary source of dread but its physical manifestation, the anguine symbolism representing something deeper in our relationship with people, the lizard-brain revulsion outshone by an equally primal desire to belong.
A similar urge underpins fear in all its guises in this collection, the various modes of suffering and death merely variations on personal isolation. Many of the stories involve abandonment, from the aforementioned herpetologist’s son to the deserted sisters of ‘Dogs Go Wolf’ and the grad student’s abrupt slide through the cracks of society in ‘Above and Below’. Thus, Groff’s position feels less ideological than visceral, driven not by some educated understanding or calculated decision, rather a direct and fundamental fear, stories dictated by dread.
This is typified best by several linked pieces which share the same principle character, a noticeably Groffian woman who lives in Florida with her husband and two sons. The Florida of this woman’s world is a canary in the coal mine, a ground zero for the approaching catastrophe. Her anxiety is not concerned with the likelihood of disaster, but rather the scale. Degrees of ruin sorted into a hierarchy—individual, familial, local, regional, national, global—and the question becomes whether a personal calamity will get to the characters before the climate slides into a planetary one. Will they get picked off one by one by a monstrous feline before the sea engulfs the peninsula? Will their house collapse into a sinkhole, killing them before the real trouble begins? Because, while the titular state might be uniquely dangerous, with its cottonheads and gators and mythic black panthers, the real looming threat is more ubiquitous and inescapable. “She had always thought this would be the place to be during the climate wars that she sees looming in the future,” Groff writes, her protagonist finding Paris hotter than she had imagined. “But maybe there is no place to be; maybe all places on a hotter planet will be equally bad, desert and hunger everywhere.”
In the opening story ‘Ghosts and Empties’ we find her wandering the streets after dark, afraid to be in the house because of a propensity to yell, leaving the parenting duties to her husband, who does not yell. However, far from appearing unhinged, the narrator comes across the sane one. Indeed, the blunt aggression could be said to be analogous to Richard Powers’ writing style, a sudden burst of plain-speaking in a world of repression. Who wouldn’t yell, knowing what we know, living how we do?
During the day, while my son’s are in school, I can’t stop reading about the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, the great Pacific trash pyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species, millennia snuffed out as if they were not precious. I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow date this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.
Florida is out now via William Heinemann (UK) and Riverhead (US).