“Between the Shadow and the Soul”
by Lauren Groff
from the December 16, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
I love Lauren Groff’s work, and so I’m very excited we are getting a new story from her as we near the end of 2024.
They had lived together for twenty-five years in the old stone house on a bend in the river. They were young when they first saw the place, wildly in love, and so poor they could afford only one of two dwellings in the valley: a battered trailer huddled against the cold wind, and the antique house in the foreclosure, a breath from letting the weeds muscle it back into the earth. Willie had wanted the trailer; when you flicked on the lights there, no shower of sparks fell from knob-and-tube wiring. But Eliza had a vision. We’ll be happy in this house, she said, watching the green river slide through the willows. So they spent the first spring, summer, and fall living in a tend in the largest bedroom, cooking with a propane camper stove, and bathing in the river, and they taught themselves how to shingle the roof, to wire and plumb, to plaster and paint and scrape and refinish. Nearly every penny they made went straight into the house; nearly every spare hour was spent on house projects or finding antiques at yard sales and in thrift stores and bringing them back to life.
I must say that even after that long first paragraph, I am not sure what we have in store for us. But I’m okay with that. I have learned to trust Groff, and so I look forward to finishing this.
Please feel free to comment below!
I hope someone else will comment here and help me appreciate this story more. I felt its effects were rather slight. Somehow I kept waiting for an “edge” to the narration, something idiosyncratic to elevate it or to skew the straightforward story of a woman trapped in a life with a husband who needs a mother. I hope that someone can shed some light on it and prove themselves a more insightful reader.
I hated this story. The narrative felt tired. I am a woman who turned 50 this past November – I could not relate. I am happy to report – firsthand – that depression, desperation, and unhappiness with your changing body is not all a woman necessarily has to look forward to in her 50s, or any other decade of her life. There wasn’t anything here that felt fresh or true or new or brave. We don’t need any more stories like these to reinforce stereotypes of “older” women as pathetic objects of shame. The writing, itself, was flat and unremarkable. Not much to commend here, though, I too, am open to approaching this from a different angle. Have I missed something in my general annoyance with this writer?
I’m not sure I’ll persuade you, but I thought it was very well done. I read it as a reflection on the complex bonds which might hold people together and the sadness and loss associated with lives unlived – and in any life there must be other possible lives which are unlived? I didn’t feel it to be a negative portrayal of the woman. While the man’s way of being is given an ‘explanation’ in the early memory(late in the story )the woman’s emotional world is in some ways left for the reader to surmise. Does she want to be with him? Did she want children? Is her ‘depression’ associated with the realisation that she may have wanted to ? Why has she chosen to be with him ? I hadn’t read any of Lauren Groff’s work before but I would be interested to read more.
It is a difficult story to read because
it makes the point how everything that might make one happy seems so possible when one is young. But that often that all that one hoped would come true, doesn’t.
It also makes the point that certain decisions one might not think about that much until well after they’ve been made. And then so much time is elapsed, there is so little chance to compensate for any regret or damage.
An interesting thing about this story is the genders were reversed from how the usual drifting away after a long relationship occurs. It’s usually the husband who gets bored when the relationship turns a little too predictable and transactional and the reason to stay in seems less logical or practical.
But some transactional relationships aren’t as satisfying because what’s gained seems always so much less than what was actually desired. Then the change it up option seems more attractive but sometimes can be a worse repeat of the original.
So there are these little ambiguities that can show up as one gets older and I think they were very well presentedfin how this story moved forward.
The sense of place and the sort of ambiguous progression of the common everyday events make it difficult for the protagonist to exert any agency over the situation other than to try get the most out of whatever presents itself to one.
It is very easy not to want to do anything when one retires yet know now that if the first part of life didn’t have enough meaning, then the second we be much worse unless something is done to keep one going.
I think it is courageous to write about these sorts of things because most people don’t enjoy confronting certain truths. But reading about them encourages one to try and figure it out or at least deal with it in some sort of small practical way.