Stories that stretch like novels. A Contrary review by Thea Brown  Short-story collections tend to compete against novels by examining moments, brief points in time, but Lauren Groff’s unusual new collection of short stories, Delicate Edible Birds, takes a different route. Groff works with extended timeframes and the concept of reflection in a way that highlights her richly wrought characters, both inside and outside the immediate temporal territories in which they exist. Time-wise, the stories in Groff’s collection sprawl; several take place over not just years but decades. “Majorette”—a particularly lengthy tale of a small-town girl—describes the stretch of time from the birth of the protagonist to her own daughter’s teenage years. We first learn of the unnamed main character as “a bundle in the oven, a baby yet invisible but still extremely present,” then as an infant who “watched the two planets in her universe swing each other around the dance floor of the kitchen, pink and sweaty, giggling, smoking, drinking.” Later we watch as she “marched at the head of the marching band in her knee-high boots, in her spangly little leotard, in her hat like an upended loaf of bread,” and later still we see her as a mother herself, in the bleachers of a high school volleyball game. In the case of “Majorette,” the story traverses forty years of a character’s life in thirty pages, but the effect is like watching a neighbor’s vacation slide show; we’re left to question what, exactly, makes this particular story worth telling. Other stories, though, like “L. DeBard and Aliette” put extended timeframes to better use as fitting homes for bright characters. “L. DeBard and Aliette” is a lovely, Progressive Era tale of a headstrong girl with polio and her down-and-out swimming instructor. With grand characters and a grander setting (Manhattan during the disastrous flu epidemic of 1918), the passing of years feels appropriate—cinematic, even. Groff clearly displays a devotion to her characters, stretching their existences into the futures and pasts of their immediate narratives in a way that, more often than not, adds an appealing weight to her tales. Even stories that take place over shorter stretches of time encourage patinas of reflection like those that accompany Groff’s more lengthy efforts. This removed perspective frees Groff’s narrators to remark upon the events of the story at hand with an older-wiser tone that brings nostalgia and sentimentality to the discussion. However, this perspective can sometimes be distracting. “Lucky Chow Fun”—set in the fictional upstate New York town of Templeton where Groff’s New York Times bestselling debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, took place—may be the prime example. The story recounts the social distress of a tightly knit community when a scandalous secret comes to light. The narrator, a swim-team star named Elizabeth, pulls back near the end of the story to a years-later viewpoint: “Only now, many years later, can I imagine what the real tragedy had been… I forgot about the poor Lucky Chow Fun girls. Only now, years later, do I dream of them.” The move to the future is frustrating; the story’s present is good—very good—with its skillful intertwining of fable and real life. It doesn’t need a far-away reflection at the end to highlight its themes or clarify its message. Despite occasional excess retrospection, Groff’s language shows clarity and depth, and it sounds as lovely as the images it conveys. At the sentence level, her vivid, precise lines are near word-perfect—to be consumed with attention and admiration. In “The Wife of the Dictator” Groff writes, “Like our children who hold up for our scrutiny the strange stones they find by the lakeside, green-veined, bulb-shaped chunks of this country, we hold the dictator’s wife up for our husbands’ amusement... We turn her this way and that, and, in the process, we make her an object of wonder.” Ultimately, Delicate Edible Birds exhibits a skillful grasp of pacing and language that sets Groff apart from a sea of young fiction writers. She finds the capacity of a short story to work with concepts usually reserved for novels, and her characters, who can handle the reflection and expansion of time, hold her collection together. Thea Brown is a freelance writer and philosophy instructor in Madison, WI, and will be attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop with a Truman Capote Fellowship in the fall. Index of Reviews...>Reviews.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0

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Delicate Edible Birds

Lauren Groff

2009, Voice

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