THE VASTER WILDS by Lauren Groff — reviewed by Stella

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff $37

The Vaster Wilds is a philosophical survival story. Propelled by movement and language, Lauren Groff will have you gripped from page one and immersed in a world all its own — all a single young woman’s own.  A girl wrenched from all she is. From the poor house to a curiosity for a bored wife to a mother-child companion to a babe, her life is a series of insults and strange affections. When we meet her she is sixteen, maybe seventeen. She’s been taken to America — a bundle like any other package that might be of use to fetch, to carry, to punish. But the night we meet her she is leaving; escaping famine and disease, turning her back on a community brutalised by their own greed and faith. Fearing what is beyond, she leaves because to stay is worse. And into this world, she runs and hides. Watching ahead and watching her back. A man is hunting her. She can feel him. Eyes are on her. She can sense them. And occasionally she skirts settlements, wary of her difference. Mostly she is alone. On the ice, in the mud. Fevered and wounded. With her meagre possessions she uses all her wits to stay alive, to survive. To dream of a place where maybe the French are — despite their Papist inclination they are desirable. She sleeps and hides from the light, travels on the river in a stolen wreck of a boat, and falls into a fever-dream in a hollowed-out tree while a storm passes overhead. As we move with her, the story unfolds. The story of her name, her childhood, the journey across the vast Atlantic where she finds love and heartache, the liveliness of her mind (a quickness necessary in the brutal world of servitude), and her determination to survive and find herself a home in the world. As the girl moves through the wilderness, it seems at any moment she will cease to exist, that she will be taken up in the arms of the trees, or submerged by icy waters, or lie prone on the stone until she becomes as still. Yet no, something within, as primal as the environment she moves through, keeps her breathing, but in this breath she becomes as one with the wilds. Lauren Groff writes the girl into the wilderness. There is a beauty in the existential nature of the girl’s plight as she grapples with survival, she questions her god, and the good and bad intentions of humankind; finds solace in her meagre possessions, and equilibrium with the natural world — a place both difficult and wondrous.