Lauren Groff is required reading: Her newest stories prove she’s among the best in the game

The stories in Lauren Groff’s third collection, “Brawler,” largely feature people who’ve hit crisis points in their lives: the abusive partner, the natural disaster, the relapse, the deathbed. This is as it ought to be with short stories, which have to make their points in a relative hurry. Groff, a perpetual bestseller, is gifted at that: Her previous collection, “Florida,” was a National Book Award finalist, along with two of her other books that earned the honor.

But there are few things Groff appreciates more as a writer than a history lesson — her books have reached back to medieval times, the New World, the Civil War, the Spanish Flu, and beyond, often tracking her heroes across decades. These should be conflicting instincts, but in “Brawler,” Groff successfully blends the depth of the long view and the drama of the pivotal moment.

Two of the stories here, among her best, exemplify that skill. “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” focuses on Chip, a ne’er-do-well scion of a wealthy New Hampshire banking family where “everything had been decided for him long before he was born.” Privilege has made him soft, and a cushy but dispiriting job in the family business has helped stoke his alcoholism. At the urging of his sister, he retreats to a family cottage, where he intends to detox and dedicate his time to repairing the home’s many flaws.

So far, so neatly symbolic. But a disruption for Chip’s self-imposed rehab — and for narrative expectations — arrives in the form of a woman named Pearl Spang. She triggers a childhood memory for Chip: Decades earlier, she was a low-class townie brought home by a relative to spite their WASPy just-so existence. In time, “Pearl Spang” became the family shorthand for any low-class person. His fling with Pearl in the present might be a cross-cultural meet-cute. But Chip’s need for connection and reflexive sense of entitlement proves disastrous — the story isn’t going the way he wanted, and Groff allows it to collapse on him.

The second story, “Birdie,” captures a friendship on the verge of tatters among a group of women. Birdie is in the hospital dying, nearly abandoned. (“She had only her friends and her parents these days because she had been a freelancer and had worked alone and a boyfriend had taken off at the first diagnosis, stealing the cat.”) Her childhood friend Nicole has corralled various friends to say their goodbyes to Birdie, but Nicole is thrust into the spotlight, asked to explain a teenage affair with a married couple that ostracized her.

Gone is the tender goodbye story. But gone too is a sense that we understand each other’s pasts, and Nicole’s understanding of Birdie shatters into a mess of devotion and anger. They were intimates in childhood and the present, but “those were only two forgivable Birdies,” she writes. “All the Birdies in between … still had something to answer for.”

Both of those stories work because they’re not just stories about how our past relationships shape us — that well-worn element of trauma plots — but how we’re also shaped by the social narratives we’re raised with. Wealth should always put power in his corner, Chip figured, even when he’s humble; sexual independence shouldn’t be a source of shame, Nicole assumed. But they’re undone by people who have other ideas about their assumptions.

The remainder of “Brawler” pursues these themes with similar intensity, if relatively smaller scope. In “To Sunland,” a young woman in 1957 is on the road to bring her mentally challenged brother to a facility and make her own trip to college, confronting the harsh judgment of others about both. The high school girl in the title story is seething over her mother’s slow decline, a quiet agony that Groff slingshots into the future and “the denser and darker and far lonelier stuff that would make up the rest of her life.”

Sometimes Groff leans directly into the violence that the title implies. The collection is bookended by stories about abused women: In “The Wind,” a girl joins her grandmother as she plans an escape from her violent husband (“shoved his gun in my mouth this time”) and “Annunciation” features a woman working a temp job inputting case files for abused children while working with a woman and landlady facing abuse themselves. (“They tied me up and took everything I had that was good.”) Groff foregrounds these characters’ emotional strength, but she’s also careful not to descend into easy platitudes about resilience. Her women aren’t triumphing so much as sidestepping death, and forced to live with their choices’ aftereffects for years to come.

“I look around and can see it in so many other women, passed down from a time beyond history, this wind that is dark and ceaseless and raging within,” Groff writes. That’s the last line of a story, but it gives nothing away. It’s the emotional place where all the stories in this spirited, anguished book begins.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

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