Vast — and empty
Lauren Groff has been hailed as one of the most talented young American writers of our age. Last year I decided to check her out, so I read the novels Matrix and The Monsters of Templeton and a short-story collection titled Florida. Most recently I read her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds.
As I half-expected after scanning a couple of reviews, I found reading it a harrowing experience. It took me several weeks to finish because I could take only a chapter or so at a time. It’s a visceral read about a young woman trying to survive in the wilderness under conditions that are, simply, not conducive to human survival.
She is known throughout as “the girl,” though she has gone by several other demeaning names in her short life. Now in her late teens, she’s the assumed offspring of a prostitute, possibly mixed race, bound as a servant since the age of four to a family that treats her shabbily most of the time.
From England she’s hauled off to the wilds of America and the doomed colony at Jamestown, where deprivation, starvation, disease, plague and worse are commonplace. One late winter night she decides she’s had enough, and she slips outside the palisade through a hole so small that only she could slip through.
Then she runs – and runs and runs. She runs because she fears capture by some fiend sent from the fort to kill her. She runs because she fears the “savage” Powhatan natives who have turned against the arrogant white settlers destroying their land. She runs because she keeps encountering wolves and bears and other dangerous creatures. She runs because she thinks she may find shelter among the French who live somewhere in the north – how far can it be?
She runs because running is the only way she thinks she can survive. Her only tools are a knife, a hatchet, a pewter cup, a flint – and a fierce determination to stay alive.
Groff writes with a sensual, poetic, attention to detail and the joys of life in the wild. Squeamish readers may wish for less detail in her descriptions of the horrid things the girl endures, and has endured all her life.
Mostly unschooled but observant and keenly intelligent, she also has a fine memory; she seems to have absorbed the best of what she’s heard from the pulpit over the years. As she makes her way through the endless forest or huddles against the cold at night, she engages in sophisticated speculation about the nature of God and the universe and comforts herself with memories of the few truly happy moments she’s been allowed to enjoy.
A sort of epiphany slowly dawns upon her. As the loss of a star does not dim the splendor of constellations, so she would not be missed in this world of grand and indifferent beauty. Still, she had felt the goodness of the sun and the wind against her cheek. Perhaps that was enough.
Perhaps. But in the end I found such unformed metaphysical speculation to be both vacuous and unsatisfying — and that’s by summation of the book itself.
The Vaster Wilds is not a happy tale. It’s often grim and hard to take. If you’re up to it, it’s worth the trek. If you have any doubts, best skip it.