In “Annunciation,” a story in Lauren Groff’s eighth book of fiction, the cash-strapped narrator seeks an affordable place to live in Mountain View, Calif. She finds one in a cottage on the property of an eccentric German woman named Griselda, who offers her a break in rent in exchange for cleaning up after an enormous Great Dane. “The place sang to me in a register straight out of the fairy tales I’d loved as a child,” the narrator reports. “It seemed a place built for Titania and Puck and little volatile men who grant three wishes.”

Brawler

by Lauren Groff

Riverhead Books
288p, $29

Groff’s confident storytelling voice similarly operates in a fairy-tale register in many of these stories, with settings that at first seem enchanted, stark moral choices at the center of the plots, and characters who begin as archetypes, as in one story in which the main characters are described only as “the mother” and “the daughter.” However, unlike in fairy tales, no magic intervenes in these characters’ lives, and the distinction between good and bad characters is difficult to parse. Groff’s characters become more particular with each choice they make, and dark fates unspool in even the most idyllic settings.

If fairy tales influenced Groff in some style elements, her source is clearly not Disney but Grimm. A “fairy tale ending” these days signifies a resolution in which everything turns out for the best; but in many older, wilder fairy tales, that is not the case. Fairy tales end with the grandmother irrevocably eaten by the wolf, or the little mermaid rejected by the prince and disintegrating into sea foam. Groff’s stories end with the surviving characters haunted by what has unfolded—deaths, illnesses, startling failures of moral courage.

The masterful opening story, “The Wind,” begins with a chilling sentence: “Pretend, the mother had said when she crept to her daughter’s room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day.” Of course, the next day is instead extraordinary. 

A battered mother attempts to spirit her children away from her abusive husband without being detected. The beating the mother endured the night before the story begins causes the youngest son to ask his sister, “Is she dead?” The kids pack their clothes in their school backpacks and the mother puts them on the bus as usual—but asks the bus driver to drop them off a few stops down the road, rather than at school. The bus driver sees the sister’s black eye and the mom’s swollen face and understands, promises not to mark the kids missing so their absence from school won’t prompt a call to the house until second period, enough time to travel farther down the road. 

As more townspeople offer the family small kindnesses—an advance on a paycheck, a vow to keep mum—the suspense and terror over just what kind of monster the abuser is grows. How can the townspeople all acknowledge that the abuser is beastly and in constant pursuit but do nothing to punish or restrain him? 

Studies suggest police officers more frequently abuse their partners than do people in other professions, but because they can use the tools of their jobs to control and surveil, their partners have fewer avenues for escape. Out of this stark fact, Groff has conjured a riveting story that captures the emotional impact on all the characters and shows how a history of abuse reverberates through successive generations. 

We learn the narrator is the child of the daughter in the story, who at the end reflects: “She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind…. 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.”

Although the villain in “The Wind” is as terrifying as any wolf or witch, in the rest of the stories in Brawler, the malevolence that stokes the plot arises from the shadow side of ordinary people whom no one would label as evil. Their fateful decisions, often stemming from a casual slip of the tongue or merely not speaking up when they should, are usually unintentional, or if there is any intent to harm, that motivation lies buried deep within a character’s psyche so that they are not even aware of it themselves.

In an author’s note, Groff mentions she lives a mile away from a state residential facility for the developmentally disabled in Gainesville, Fla., that is a progressive place now but in the past was a site of mistreatment called Sunland. Groff imagines the life of a family forced to leave a relative there. Filtered through the sensory-focused perspective of Buddy, a developmentally disabled 20-year-old, “To Sunland” shows how a run of bad luck ends with Buddy’s admission to the hospital. Buddy and his younger sister Joanie were raised by a single mother who has recently died. Their aunt refuses to care for Buddy for more than a few days, and Joanie has no means to help. Instead, Joanie has accepted a scholarship to a women’s college in Maine and promises Buddy she’ll come back for him when she can. 

Groff makes the reader feel the difficulty, love and loss at the heart of Joanie’s choice, and we understand her justification for it—she needs an education to support herself, let alone Buddy—but we also see her hunger to escape the town, her family and its burdens. The “selfish” choice can sometimes be the best one available. Groff’s precise, witty rendering of the Florida characters, their dialogue and their psychological motivations will remind readers of Flannery O’Connor.

The aforementioned final story, “Annunciation,” with the narrator saving on rent by scooping up the considerable droppings of a Great Dane, expresses ideas that serve as a key to the collection. The narrator’s coworker lives in a Volkswagen Vanagon with her daughter, in hiding presumably from an abusive partner, ready to flee at the first sign of danger. One day, the narrator’s casual lunchtime gossip sets off a chain of events that causes the Vanagon family to disappear.

“There are moments in our lives when our sense of our own goodness is so shaky that we build elaborate defenses against the possibility that we may be far worse than we fear,” she reflects. “I have come to think that I had a secret intention, held at the very center of my actions, so small and dark that I pretended not to see it then; I could not see it even a decade later. It is only now, when I know myself to be good and bad in equal measure, that I can glimpse it, if barely.” 

This recognition is central to Brawler, an acknowledgment that each of us contains the wolf, the coward and the hero inside us, and that each of us may express the first two elements more often than we’d like. Or, as Griselda puts it, “In every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death.” 

The narrator reflects on how this idea comes through in the sculptures of the Virgin Mary found in churches throughout California: “There are a thousand Madonnas here, with a thousand different faces. Each Madonna wears the face of a particular mortal woman whom the artist loved. Each woman is one in whom the animal was briefly overcome by the god that lived within her.”

In Brawler, Lauren Groff has crafted a taut, diverting collection of short stories that feel as timeless as fairy tales and turn on moral conundrums that leave readers with plenty to ponder.

Jenny Shank’s story collection Mixed Company won the Colorado Book Award and the George Garrett Prize, and her first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post and Image. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.