The Vaster Wilds: A Novel by Lauren Groff

Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff is a stunningly shocking fever dream, a narrative that “follows a girl’s escape from a nameless colonial settlement into the unforgiving terrain of America.” [NY Times] Written in third person and taking place over only a few weeks in the 1600s, the novel embraces the perspective of a servant known only as “the girl,” who flees from certain death in a plague-blighted settlement in the New World only to face precarious survival in “the great and terrible wilderness.” She heads north but has no known specific destination and each day becomes a battle: of tending to her travel-weary body, staying warm and dry enough, finding food to sustain her, and shelter to rest. The time that fills these pages is a horrible time. The girl suffers winter, suffers starvation. She is plagued by nightmares, hunted by men. The boots that keep her feet warm also stab her with nails. And yet this is the freest she has ever been. She is surrounded by the beauty of the New World in all its terrific splendor.

Then she walked her way through the last light back into the unburnt world, where the still-bare bushes glowed with good health, where the birds sang and argued overhead, where she could nearly hear the sap rising fresh in whispering song within the living trees. [p. 75]

And far away, the final cold flare of sun uplit in red the sharp spines of trees along a distant rise. Then all the light suddenly went out, and the moon rose into its seat in the deep dark blue sky. [p. 77]

Once, she opened her eyes to a moonlit clearing, the trees hunched at the edges into an ardent watching forest; the spring-stirred soil smelled tender in the silvery night, and thickening the sky with its barest of light was the near-dissolved rim of the moon. [p. 210]

For something in her after this day loved the comfort of laying her head down peacefully among the small and unseen creatures of the wilderness. [p. 199]

One of the many achievements attained by Lauren Goff is the manner in which she describes the minutiae of life and then moves to more general truths and learnings.

When the lids of the oysters rose and showed the cooking flesh within, she saw that inside some oysters there were fat pearls, which she took up in her fingers, marveling. As she held them, she saw them as though they were in the ears of haughty noblewomen or strung and lying luminous on the mistress’s whitened throat. And she laughed at providence handing her such precious stuff here in the wilds, where, without trade, it became trash. [pp. 104-105]

One of my favorite chapters describes a Jesuit missionary who arrived in the Americas only to see his compatriots had all been massacred. He ran to the forest to hide, living alone for decades. The author writes:

He was not a man original to this place. This would have been clear to the girl if she had been able to see him, but what he was would have been mightily difficult for her to fathom. He seemed a chimera, half man, half beast. Human eyes were embedded within a matted mass of hair from the scalp which had grown all together into the hair from the beard and the back and the shoulders and chest so that he wore a filthy seedy tunic out of which lower arms and legs did poke. His hair-tunic was black at the edges but yellowed by sun and years, fully grayed in the most recent hair, where it grew out of the mouth and temples. And what was not covered by the hair-tunic was covered by a motley rug of the hides of small game, chipmunk and muskrat and squirrel and hare, pieced together with dried gut. At the ends of the hands, his nails curled in talons of yellow horn. And on the feet two male coneys had been skinned whole for shoes and were tied upon the ankles by the long ears. He smelled like something long dead. [p. 88]

I loved The Vaster Wilds for its riveting survival story, powerful prose, and exploration of the human condition. It is a coming-of-age story and the protagonist’s thoughts as she becomes more self-aware are memorably conveyed. For instance:

Now, watching the bear staring upon the waterfall, she felt in her own body the awe that was now coursing through the bear, and within herself she also felt a shifting in her understanding of the world.

For if a bear could feel awe, then a bear could certainly know god.

And if a bear could know god in his own bear way, then a bear had a soul, and she could not see how it was that man could feel it was in his right to slaughter such beasts, for in slaughtering the bear’s body, man was also slaughtering the beast’s soul, which also yearned toward god. [p. 177]

Powerful stuff from a gifted writer! It was an absolute pleasure to read this book and I highly recommend it!

Credit for opening art Tom Haugomat.

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