Why do you think the book was called "Florida"? Any theories about the suntan box?
There's a lot of geography covered in the book. The story moves around the upper Midwest, the Southwest, Florida, California and New York (these are the ones I can remember). Why so many locations?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I was sort of waiting for the actual Florida to make an appearance in the book, to take on greater significance. I guess Florida was just the romantic ideal that Alice and her mother would never get to live, a contrast to the continually uncomfortable existence that seemed to follow them wherever in the country they went.
ReplyDeleteAt one point, I thought Florida acted like a metaphor for what you wanted to make out of life. Under the chapter "Arthur," when Alice's mother goes to the San, it says, "The next day she was off to her Florida, and I was off to mine."
ReplyDeleteBut I could be wrong. Any thoughts? :)
To me, the number of places mentioned contributes to the isolation and fragmented feeling that seems to illustrate the author's life. Things seem cut off, interrupted, hardly ever resolved.
I rather liked the title and the suntan box. For decade after decade, developers built these cramped suburbs in Florida and the little boxes sold cheaply enough that lots of people could realize their “dream”. But they quickly found their new existence was as dreary as their old just it was now hot, muggy and buggy, and they were still a long way from the beach. The suntan box captures beautifully how dubious this sort of “romantic ideal” is.
ReplyDelete"... the romantic ideal that Alice and her mother would never get to live, a contrast to the continually uncomfortable existence that seemed to follow them wherever in the country they went."
ReplyDeleteBeautifully put, Erin. They seem like a pair of emotional nomads, characterized by, as Shanxi so aptly said, isolation and fragmented feeling.
As a kid, the narrator says, "Florida, where was it, I wondered, but nobody knew." She's talking about the Florida suntan box that Arthur had made for her mother, but also, clearly, the Florida that's the ideal you two mentioned.
Later in the book, she and her mother are driving through fields of snow. Only the narrator, summoning beach imagery, calls them "shores of snow." Mother had her sad face on when she said, "You'll like it in a warm place in the middle of winter." I found that interesting, because that's really how we tend to think of Florida, not so much on its own terms, but in relative terms, as a sunny refuge from our bleak winter. Going to Florida in the summer has far less appeal, because it's really the contrast that makes the idea of Florida so poignant.
Driftwood, nice take on the suntan box! I hadn't thought of that aspect, but it's very compelling. The dream of the sunny, bountiful paradise eludes most people, whether it's the middle-class suburbanites investing in cramped Florida real estate, or the "The Grapes of Wrath" migrants whose only experience of California's promised beauty and richness turned out to be soul-killing agricultural labors, or even the Great Gatsbys, whose hurdle isn't money so much as the ruinous overestimation of other people's "capacity for wonder."
ReplyDeleteHmm. The “Grapes of Wrath” comparison is interesting. Certainly many immigrants to California felt the despair of dashed dreams particularly during the ‘30s. But the remarkable thing about California is that the Golden State did actually have—briefly—a Golden Age. For about 20 years after the war, people came to this state and got well paying jobs in expanding new industries, most notably aerospace, bought nice new houses, sent their kids to wonderful public schools, and more generally enjoyed the expanding public services funded by a rapidly growing economy. That era was falling apart by the late 60’s and was definitively finished by the time of Proposition 13.
ReplyDeleteI’m not aware of Florida ever having an era that matched. Florida certainly had some booms and busts, but my sense—perhaps ill-informed—was that the booms tended to be a bit hollow by being driven by property development. Anyways, I’ve been pondering that Alice’s mother ended up in California and not Florida. Any thoughts on this? What does “California” mean to people?
California had earlier boom times, too, like the Gold Rush, right?
ReplyDeleteWhen I think of California, I think of Jack Kerouac's "end-of-the-land sadness." It's the western frontier, as far as you can go. It has a kind of terminal romance about it. And it's a magnet for all sorts of dreamers, from hippies to extreme-athletes to actors to the socially marginalized. It has that same cachet as New York: somewhere people to go to "make it." And if they don't make it, they just stick around because it's the farthest they can go. (Unless you're Jack Kerouac and just keep madly criss-crossing the continent).
WHen I think of Florida, I think of spring break, Disney and retirees. It's somewhere to vacation and somewhere to die. Not necessarily somewhere to live.
And California, New York and Florida all have the distinction of being full of people from somewhere else.