“Brawler”
by Lauren Groff
from the May 13, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
I tend to find Lauren Groff’s stories enigmatic but tantalizing, a nice combination. There’s a darkness about them, an exploration of the nooks and crannies of awareness, at things we usually don’t acknowledge in the daylight hours, at things that usually come out in those miserable, anxious hours before dawn.
That doesn’t mean that the stories take place at that time, or in any time of darkness. On the contrary. In “Brawler,” for example, we begin at a sunny swimming pool: “In the afternoon sunlight the pool was harsh; she’d left it only this morning in the soft plum dawn.”
This is Sara, a competitive diver, and diving is a fitting metaphor for Sara’s approach to life. In contrast to what I described earlier as the “miserable, anxious hours before dawn,” Sarah might describe those as the good times. It’s almost like the opening of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, when the poem laments that spring is coming and stirring up life after “Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow.”
As the story goes along, we see that Sara has been in a fight, that she has fled detention, and that she longs for the relief that comes when she can retreat into the bathroom at her subterranean basement apartment. Sara longs for the fugue state, and when it arrives, thanks to a nature show on the television, Groff makes it rather lovely and appealing:
And then all at once she felt it, a slippage, a slickness, and even though it wasn’t taking place within her own body, she could see the slow and uncontrollable dilation downward and outward, into a vast sun-bright plain full of golden grasses swaying as though brushed by a great hand, and a horizon that didn’t stop in the vagueness that came at the end of sight, but pressed on into the palest and most fragmented of blues.
This is, as we see, a girl who longs for an emptiness at the end of each day, who competes hard and who fights hard, all, it seems, in an effort to keep the darker future at bay.
I quite liked the story. It’s nothing particularly new, but as brief as it is it feels fleshed out. I know little about Sara, but I know enough, and Groff’s descriptions of her fights and retreats are nicely done.
What struck me most right from the start of this story was the power of Groff’s command of description. There is a sophistication and strength of detail in the writing that made reading this story a very visual experience for me. Sometimes I read a story and think it would make a good film. This story already felt like it was one. In scope, it is a fairly short story, yet it has a lot of very small scenes described in the course of it, making it a bit more of an evocative collage than a narration of events, although it is that as well.
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The story started to lose some of its power when we get to the (rather jarring) transition from the pool to the store. Part of what makes it so abrupt is the transition of point of view to the boy working there. It only last for the brief scene, so I’m not sure why she does this, but it did not work for me. Plotwise, the remaining of the story feels a lot more conventional and familiar. I wonder if it would not have been better to keep the pool as the main location of the story to the end and intersperse it with these other scenes. I agree with Trevor about the use of the television program she watches, but I wonder if bringing it close to the description of her at the end of the pool scene might have worked better.
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My past experience reading Groff’s stories has been mixed, but generally more negative than positive. I’d still say my reaction to this story is more mixed than fully positive, but there was a lot more I liked a lot about this one than her previous work.
The diving scene was very poorly written. There is no way to do a back 2 1/2 and graze the board with your neck. Ankle maybe but there’s also no way anyone watching would have missed it. And how old is this girl supposed to be? That’s a college level dive, off a 3m, and she’s in fifth grade? As unbelievable as a fifth grader dunking and the ref calling it as a 3pointer.
“Sara longs for the fugue state, and when it arrives, thanks to a nature show on the television, Groff makes it rather lovely and appealing … This is, as we see, a girl who longs for an emptiness at the end of each day, who competes hard and who fights hard, all, it seems, in an effort to keep the darker future at bay.”
Is she not describing Sara’s mom dying in her lap?
Josh (1) – As I read it I wondered about the description of the dive and how realistic it was. I decided that since I didn’t know anything about diving that maybe it was, but even if it wasn’t it was the sort of detail where substituting the description of a different dive would fix it. So I would call it an error of sloppiness, at worst, and not one that does any real harm to the story. But I agree that you would think she should have gotten the dive right.
Josh (2) – She’s not in the fifth grade. I don’t think the story specifies, but it seems likely she is a high school student. I think you misread a reference to fifth period as fifth grade.
R – Yes. The final paragraph is a bit subtle, but I would say it is clear enough that the mother has died and Sara knows it.
Totally with David above in that the very first thing that hit me in this story is that you can “see” it. So powerfully visual. It’s the long-ago film student in me. The author puts it all there on the page. We enter the life of Sara and leave, no before and no after. Nothing else is necessary, and the impression we have is intense, a life somewhere between brief ecstatic moments, desolation, even love. I think quite remarkable!
Lauren is one of our most successful and feted authors, so it would be nice if she tried to employ a little imagination at some point. I have to admit I wondered if I would /not/ be introduced to an adolescent girl on the brink of adulthood. Here, a spoiled, selfish brat with the customary pretexts for horrific behavior incarnates the fascist fetish for fitness culture and the obsession with competition; it ends with a very teutonic transfiguration that splashes together roughly equal parts orgasm, suicide, incest, murder, and mass media. It’s all told with plenty of pointless high expressionism and not much humor, and the true nil in all this nihilism is the amount of self awareness.
She tweeted she just finished Search of Lost Time and saw the Ring. I vote for less Wagner and more Proust! She’s a better writer than this!
Holy smoke! Ursula you got a lot out of this story. “Fascist fetish, teutonic tranfiguration, orgasm, suicide, incest, murder, and mass media…told with pointless high expressionism”!!! All in just a few pages. Cool!
I better read this one again.
I’m gonna second that. Mom described as malnourished and dehydrated. Dead at the end… Describes her head as “cooling”.
I’ve long been a fan of Groff’s writing, but this effort pretty much left me cold. It felt choppy and disjointed and none of the characters made me care about them one whit. For me, there was a coldness and a distance to the story that held me at arm’s length from any kind of real involvement with the various (and often confusing) goings-on that I don’t generally feel with Groff’s work. It was disappointing, but I’ll continue to read her new stories and hope that this was just a one-off that didn’t work, at least for me.