“The Wind”
by Lauren Groff
from the February 1, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
Since I started posting on stories in The New Yorker, Lauren Groff has shown up seven (now eight) times, with a pretty steady flow of one story per year for the last half decade. I like her stories a lot, though I’ve never turned this into a deeper exploration of her work. Here’s another opportunity to read her work and maybe reevaluate my TBR pile to include one of her novels.
I’m very excited by “The Wind.” I think Groff’s stories are delicate and dark, and this one seems to be of a kind:
Pretend, the mother had said when she crept into her daughter’s room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day.
So the daughter had risen as usual and washed and made toast and warm milk for her brothers, and while they were eating she emptied their schoolbags into the toy chest and filled them with clothes, a toothbrush, one book for comfort. The children moved silently through the black morning, put on their shoes outside on the porch. The dog thumped his tail against the doghouse in the cold yard but was old and did not get up. The children’s breath hovered low and white as they walked down to the bus stop, a strange presence trailing them in the road.
That’s quite the haunting opening, wonderfully done, especially considering so much of it is just describing — but in well paced and suggestive sentences — children simply getting ready for the day.
I’ll be reading this one as soon as possible. Please feel welcome to comment below to let us know what you think!
Incredible storytelling once again from Groff. She builds tension like few know how.
I am gutted by this story. I’m not sure I deserve what I had to go through, reading it. Fine storytelling, but isn’t it a punishment for the reader, in the end?
I am gutted as well, but feel strongly that this story needed to be told. This fictional short story couldn’t have been told in such horrifying detail if it hadn’t happened in some version somewhere. I feel that Groff had to bring this story forward so that people like me, readers like me, who live comfortably most days could gain insight into the fear and violence that some people experience. Not punishment for the reader, but certainly an invitation to expanding trauma awareness and empathy that happens around us. I can imagine for many people, my husband being one of them that this story is too close to the bone to ever be read. I’m grateful that my mother-in-law is living peacefully and happily into old age, however.
Read through all of the TNY short stories by Lauren Groff that have been featured on this blog, and really enjoyed almost all of them. It was interesting to see how her style has developed over the years, and I think I’ll try giving her earlier novel ‘Arcadia’ a listen after reading these. I love the way she writes about even quite horrific topics in such a poetic way that you don’t almost realize what it is you’re reading – and I mean it in a positive way. I found myself going back and re-reading paragraphs quite a few times, but didn’t mind it at all. The beauty of Groff’s language makes it worth it to read through even the more depressing stories.
She is one of my favorite short-story writers and this is another excellent story. Usually her style is more elaborate, but here she strips things down perfectly as if knowing that this more serious tale doesn’t need ornamentation. It was a riveting, powerful experience and the sort of story that sadly still needs to be told. The last paragraph is amazing.
“A story that needs to be told”–this makes me think of a news feature or at best a fictional memoir. Both very different from what I yearn for when I read fiction.
I think, Avery, you would find that in every other story or novel Groff has written that she’s far more “artful” than this which is more of an outlier in her overall work.
Can anyone help me w/a question about this story. Only two names are used in the story (of the primary characters that is)–Ruby and Michelle. Is Michelle the narrator’s mother??? Ruby is the grandmother. The confusion comes from the moment when the bus driver looks at “mother” and says “Michelle you’ve got yourself a shiner there.” Is she referring to the young daughter’s black eye while looking at her mother as if to make clear that — both of them are being abused. I’m confused at this point. The only time “Michelle” is named is here. So is she the narrator/granddaughter or Ruby?
Thanks so much for your help. Karen
I finally caught up with this one tonight, and I am so glad I did. As others here have said, Groff really knows how to build the story, and showing this at play through the generations was important and very well done.
Karen, I think that Michelle is the narrator’s mother, but I only just read it the once and haven’t gone back to confirm so others might have a stronger answer. I feel like the narrator often calls her mother “mother” even when she is talking about her as a child.
What is the theme of this story? help