Short Story Sunday: At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners - Lauren Groff

I know that you can’t always tell from my short story reviews that I love short stories the way that I love novels, but I swear it’s true.  It’s just that short stories have more of a tendency to frustrate me than novels do.  If I see early on that a novel is not working for me, I don’t hesitate to toss it into the discard pile. That’s not something, though, that I’m likely to do with a story whose total reading time is only a small fraction of the time it takes me to finish a novel.  Curiosity keeps me reading to the very last word of most every story I start – but I sometimes end up wishing I hadn’t bothered.

Lauren Groff’s “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners” is a story that falls somewhere near the middle of my rating scale, maybe a three-out-of-five kind of story, and I’m left now trying to figure out why that is.  The story, set in Florida’s swamplands, is a highly atmospheric one in which the villain of the piece, a university herpetologist, allows his strategically located house to be invaded by live snakes even while his young son is just a toddler.  The boy’s “Yankee” mother, needless to say, is not thrilled at the thought of sharing her home with snakes and yearns for a way out.  So when the outbreak of World War II gives her an opportunity to escape her snake-filled home, she jumps all over it.

But as she would learn, it is not going to be that simple.

Lauren Groff

My unease about the story comes, I think, from its overall gloominess. The setting is scary and depressing, the characters (with perhaps one exception) are unhappy about their state in life, and so many chances for betterment are squandered, that there is no way I could ever claim to have “enjoyed” this one. But I know that not all short stories or novels are meant to be “enjoyed” or merely to entertain the reader.  Instead, what Groff has done with this one is to put me deep inside a time and place I would have to be dragged into, kicking and screaming all the way, to ever experience in the real world. She put me inside the heads of two very strange human beings – father and son – whom I learned to understand a little and empathize with a lot, and she did all of that in less than twenty pages, something that some novels don't manage in 400 pages. And now I’ve been thinking about the story way longer than it took for me to read the whole thing. 

(“At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners” first appeared in a 2013 issue of Five Points, a literary magazine published three times a year by Georgia State University. I found it in The Best American Short Stories 2014 collection compiled by Jennifer Egan and Heidi Pitlor.)