Lauren Groff, author of the bestselling “Fates and Furies” and the National Book Award finalist “Matrix,” is one of our most acclaimed writers of fiction and one of our most dedicated and generous literary citizens. In 2024, she opened an independent bookstore in Florida and is known as an indefatigable supporter of her fellow writers. “Brawler, her new book, is an aptly titled collection that wallops its reader with ferocious honesty and searing emotional force even as it demonstrates artistic delicacy, intellectual subtlety, and ethical nuance.
“The Wind,” the first story in the book, begins with an emblematic sentence that sets the tone and encapsulates the aesthetic of the entire collection: “Pretend, the mother had said when she crept to her daughter’s room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day.” The fable-like quality and the pluperfect tense prove crucial to the story, narrated recursively by the daughter of “the daughter”: she relates a tale her mother had often told her about her own mother and a pivotal day in her childhood. It’s a story about coercive control and an attempt to evade it, a parentified child who must mother her own mother, “a timid woman whose voice was low, who made herself a shadow in the world,” and the intergenerational wounds that shape individuals and families. Her mother “would tell the story…as if ripping out something that had worked its roots deep inside her;” in telling us, the narrator does the same kind of extractive work. “The Wind” ends with the narrator musing on the “silent wind” that blew through her mother, a wind that seeps into her daughter “through all the ways she taught [her]…how to move as a woman in the world” and one she sees “in so many other women, passed down from a time beyond history.”
That roiling, turbulent, inky wind, “dark and ceaseless and raging within,” blows at various intensities through all these stories as men strive to dominate women and women fawn, fear, flee, or defy their control.
But it is not just women who suffer in these stories. In “To Sunland,” a developmentally disabled young man wakes “to an angry house and darkness in the windows” after his mother dies and his sister, eager to leave home for college, breaks her promise to her mother by putting him in a home. The institution’s rebranding, from “Florida Farm College for Epileptic and Mentally Deficient Children” to Sunland, encapsulates the culturally-endorsed camouflage of moral difficulty by specious optimism.
Pretending, as the mother urged her daughter to do in “The Wind’”s opening sentence, is a major way Groff’s characters contend with loneliness and longing, anxiety and alienation, dissatisfaction and depression. At a moment of extreme fear and danger, the daughter in “The Wind” bolsters her siblings with romantic tales of their glorious future; their mother puts on a smile “to give them this last glimpse of her” before she is viciously assaulted. In “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?,” the black-sheep scion of a wealthy, old-school banking family pretends to be a humble caretaker in order to inhabit a simpler life and woo a woman his family would scorn. In “Brawler,” a talented high school swimmer assumes an attitude of toughness even as her mother spirals into delusion and paranoia. “Birdie” introduces us to a group of high school girlfriends mustering highspirited cheer but grappling with longstanding bitterness and sadness as they gather in the hospital room of their terminally ill friend.
Pretending in the form of toxic secrecy or performative happiness defines and deforms many of the families depicted in “Brawler.” “Between the Shadow and the Soul” gives us a “wildly in love” couple married for 25 years. Yet the wife has struggled silently with despondency and shame since their honeymoon; her ostensibly buoyant husband, Willie, is haunted by a childhood of physical and emotional pain: “things happened in Willie’s house, and the whole town knew, but nobody ever did anything about it.” In most of these stories, the family’s “continuous unspoken… syntax of silence” reigns, making the acts of telling, sharing, and confessing — however transitory — interstitial apertures onto freedom, release, and healing.
These are glimpses of an ordinariness that Groff’s promise of “just an ordinary day” belies. These are stories of the ordinary non-ordinary: about brutalities and tragedies large and small. Natural disasters, cancer, addiction, and mental illness beat down the characters. Some are subjected to horrendous violence; others inflict it. People feel minor slights with acute sensitivity, hold grudges and nurture grievances that poison friendship and spirit with ghosting, obsession, stalking, even criminal acts.
Afflictions bow them down to earth. Viper thoughts coil around their minds. Reality’s dark dream attacks and infects them. But even in this bleak and harsh world, glimmers of light emerge. Kind, helpful people provide succor, emotional sustenance, and practical help. Misreadings and misapprehensions occasionally fall away, people are revealed in their vulnerability, forgiveness becomes a possibility.
In a recent interview, Groff declared: “I do feel very deeply that loving attention to the soul — which is what art is — is just as important, if not more so, than constant attention to the news… if we collectively paid more attention to our own particular souls, possibly the world would be better than it is now.” Lauren Groff’s loving attention to her particular characters and to her art makes the world of literature immeasurably better for all of us.
Brawler: Stories
By Lauren Groff
Riverhead, 288 pages, $29
Priscilla Gilman is a former professor of English literature at Yale University and Vassar College and the author of “The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy” and “The Critic’s Daughter.”