Brawler by Lauren Groff, 2019
The magic trick:
Extremely effective hands-off character portrait
Very brief, very impressive short story.
We get a clear picture of the central character, teenaged Sara, with very little hand-holding from the writer. We see her do a few things – steal from the grocery, ask the doctor for help, care for her mother, etc. But we don’t get the over-written, patronizing narration explaining why she does those things. This is a story that trusts both its material and its reader. Here are some things that are happening to this girl, it tells us, now you make of it what you will.
And that’s quite a trick on Groff’s part.
The selection:
She walked up the street, her steps growing slower as she came closer to home. There were no basements in this town with its fragile bedrock, but the apartment block was built into a hill, and she lived in the cheapest unit, which was half underground. She entered the linoleum-floored front hall of the building, turned the corner, and went down the stairwell toward her door. During construction, someone had had the idea to filter the hallway light into her dim living room through a series of four colored windows above the bannister, and so as the girl descended she could look inside and see the lump of her mother on the couch lit by the shivering television glow, in red, then orange, then blue, and finally green. Even through the door she could hear the mechanical hum and over it the sound of the program, a man’s voice narrating something infinitely wearisome. She held the Popsicle’s wrapper between her teeth, took her shoes off and left them outside, put her slippers on, and unlocked the door.
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