Book Review: Brawler Screams Desperation

BRAWLER: Stories
by Lauren Groff
Riverhead Press
pp 288

Lauren Groff’s collection of stories share only one common thread: the loud, squawking desperation of working-class lives that inevitably come to an end in a one-two knockout punch. I’m glad to see a writer of considerable merit depicting working-class characters that no one really wants to know about. People are dying, rotting away, flicking cigarette ashes on the food they are about to eat, before blowing out their brains with a shotgun.

“What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” sets forth a series of vignettes as harmless as a game of musical chairs being played by middle-class white folk. The people here are slightly better off money-wise than the characters in all the other stories, but they are no less weary from the monstrously stubborn burdens they must carry.

After reading the entire collection, I can’t remember any of the characters’ names, nor did I prefer one story over another, and, for the life of me, I cannot discern if that was the author’s intent. The collective grief of the characters is so huge that it obliterates their individual identities. Characters can’t be memorable when they are so lost in the grainy shadows that there is no hope of redemption.

Lauren Groff’s craft as a writer is spectacular. Her ultra-long, fluid sentences boast of endless muscularity and athletic prowess. I can see the author knows how to dance, metaphorically speaking; when she falls on her face, she gets up from the floor, pretending nothing happened, and even though she’s bruised and bloodied, she keeps dancing.

Suffering and pain are mundane, almost humdrum, and just when you’re about to fall asleep from boredom, you experience a shock that feels as dramatic as a defibrillator. The people who inhabit BRAWLER live ordinary, horrible lives, eking out one more sorry-assed day. By the time I had finished reading BRAWLER, I didn’t know my breath had been taken away until I was sucker-punched and nothing was left.

BRAWLER Screams Desperation is an essay in my collection Notes From The Working-Class.