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Summary
Summary
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, TIME, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, LA TIMES , SLATE, HARPER'S BAZAAR and others
"Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."--NPR staff pick
"Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel."-- Los Angeles Times
"Glorious...surroundings come alive in prose that lives and breathes upon the page." -- Boston Globe
A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
Lauren Groff's new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how--and if--we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
Author Notes
Lauren Groff graduated from Amherst College and received an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her books include The Monsters of Templeton, Delicate Edible Birds, and Fates and Furies. Arcadia won of the Medici Book Club Prize. Her fiction has also won the Paul Bowles Prize for Fiction, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize.
Her work has appeared in numerous magazines including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Tin House, One Story, McSweeney's, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three editions of the Best American Short Stories.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Groff's extraordinary latest (after Matrix) tracks the life of an adolescent servant girl who flees a Jamestownesque settlement in colonial America and sets out across the wilderness. Traveling in winter, the unnamed narrator sustains herself by hunting and gathering. Despite the harsh conditions, she delights in the natural scenery, which Groff depicts with wrenching beauty ("she saw in the dim and silvery light the wind lifting lighter snow and sculpting it into a shining city with rooftops and chimneys and a steeple and even the smoke of fires merrily ascending from the chimneys toward heaven"). Through the girl's memories, the reader learns she was adopted at four from a parish poorhouse in England by a well-off woman and her husband and was tormented by the couple's older son. Several years later, the husband dies and the woman marries an ambitious minister. They force the girl to accompany them to the New World and care for their newborn baby. The colony turns out to be a godforsaken place wracked by illness, lack of food, and violent confrontations with Indigenous people. There are many exciting episodes--the narrator encounters a bear, a wolf, and an unruly former Jesuit priest who also subsists in the wild--and the staggering ending reveals the details surrounding her escape. Groff builds and maintains suspense on multiple levels, while offering an unflinching portrayal of her heroine's desperation and will to survive. This is a triumph. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Groff's seventh book, a captivating survival story, starts off running. A teenage girl, "bony and childish small," flees north on a winter night, leaving behind the diminished and starving settlement of others not of this place. She has nothing but a small bag of supplies on her person and a map, once viewed over a man's shoulder, in mind. In time, readers learn the girl's names, her circumstances as an orphan in a distant city, the hellish journey that brought her to this world, how she became more than a servant to her mistress and the woman's disabled daughter, who she loved and cared for; and the reason, ultimately, for the girl's flight. The work of survival overtakes all, though, as the girl battles weather, injury, and foes animal and human, real and imagined. In the wilderness, she finds gifts and warnings, depravity and beauty, boundless desperation and pinpointed clarity. Inspired by the "starving time" of 1609 Jamestown, this wholly enveloping book has appeal similar to that of Groff's enthusiastically celebrated Matrix (2021): deep examinations of faith, dominion, and human nature; Groff's seemingly joyfully related, seamless period prose; and the time-collapsing sense of reading a text channeled directly from the mind of a long-ago-living, breathing woman facing extraordinary circumstances.
Guardian Review
Lauren Groff's early fiction was concerned with the ways in which stories from the past lie partially visible beneath the surface of the present, threatening to erupt and disrupt. After the breakthrough success of her third novel, Fates and Furies in 2015, her perspective shifted; her follow-up, Matrix, was set firmly in a distant past - a 12th-century English convent - but told a story shot through with resonances for a modern world. Her new novel shares much common ground with its immediate predecessor. Like Matrix, it tells the story of a young woman, born an outsider in a turbulent age, fiercely determined to survive in the face of pitiless forces arrayed against her. But where Matrix considered the power of community, The Vaster Wilds - set in the new world in the early years of the 17th century - deals with its failure. The heroine, a young woman who is "but sixteen or seventeen or perhaps eighteen years of age", has fled the English settlement at Jamestown to undertake a perilous journey north through a hostile winter landscape, though the dangers she faces alone in the wilderness are no worse, she reasons, than those she has left behind. The settlement is under siege, its inhabitants dying of starvation, and everywhere she finds the same threat posed to women by men: "For even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears". As a study of the human capacity to endure solitude and hardship, it offers insight The reason for the girl's precipitate flight is hinted at early on - she stops to scrub blood from her fingernails; a man sent in pursuit describes her as a "murderess" - but the exact nature of this "moment of rupture" is not revealed until the end. Fragments of the girl's history return to her in the course of her journey; servant to a wealthy family in London, she has been brought to the new world on the whim of her mistress's new husband. A dark-skinned foundling, she was given the name Lamentations in the poorhouse, but for most of the novel she is simply "the girl". Names carry weight, she reflects at one point, because they are a way of imposing control, as the first man did in Paradise: "Name after name, Adam felt his dominion tipping into domination". The parallel strikes her as significant in this new continent. "How, in coming to this country, her fellow Englishmen believed they were naming this place and this people for the first time, and how it conferred upon them dominion in this place." Though the girl's journey away from civilisation prompts occasional interrogations of "the machinery of domination" and the strict biblical morality she has always known, it is more frequently characterised by epiphanies about the individual's relationship with the natural world - a recurrent preoccupation of the author's. As always, Groff's prose is finely worked, with a poet's eye for imagery (a porcupine walks "his bristles through the undergrowth with the weary pomp of a crowned prince") and a visionary quality that recalls Matrix. The greatest difficulty with The Vaster Wilds is that, in its concentration on the practical mechanics of survival, it can become achingly repetitive. The jacket copy calls it an "adventure story", which feels optimistic; while there are moments of potential jeopardy in the girl's rare brushes with people, these are never heightened enough to provide real drama. Instead, there is exhaustive detail about foraging, starting fires, building shelters, endless running. As a study of the human capacity to endure solitude and hardship, it offers insight, but it's hard to escape a sense of being underwhelmed by the novel's climax.
Kirkus Review
This historical fever dream of a novel follows the flight of a servant girl through the Colonial American wilderness, red in tooth and claw. As in her last novel, Matrix (2021), Groff's imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine of language and rhythm. "She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time." Those onrushing sentences will follow the girl, "sixteen or seventeen or perhaps eighteen years of age," through the wilderness surrounding the desperate colony, driven by famine and plague into barbarism, through the territory of "the powhatan and pamunkey" to what she hopes will be "the settlements of frenchmen, canada," a place she once saw pointed out on a map. The focus is on the terrors of survival, the exigencies of starvation, the challenges of locomotion, the miseries of a body wounded, infected, and pushed beyond its limit. What plot there is centers on learning the reason for her flight and how it will end, but the book must be read primarily for its sentences and the light it shines on the place of humans in the order of the world. Whether she is eating baby birds and stealing the fluff from the mother's nest to line her boots, having a little tea party with her meager trove of possessions, temporarily living inside a tree trunk that comes with a pantry full of grubs (spiders prove less tasty), or finally coming to rest in a way neither she nor we can foresee, immersion in the girl's experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization that readers may find deeply satisfying. The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
There's an essential friction to Groff's (Matrix) writing, which leaves readers torn between inhaling her compelling, shape-shifting narratives and slowing down to savor her stunning language line; with its lean narrative foundation, this work tends toward the latter reading experience. The story follows a young girl's flight from an early colonial U.S. settlement owing to murky circumstances, the full scope of which is slowly shaded in through dreams, fevers, and memories. Groff revels in this primal place, detailing the myriad brutalities and iniquities of an unforgiving colonial-era wild (society included). In one moment, all is goop and grime and gruesomeness, while the next might trace the grace and beauty of the natural world. The novel's structure is lightly Odyssean, as the young girl encounters everything from bears to Jesuits to smallpox, and while hers is fundamentally a journey from rather than toward, it's an unknown future. But while the spareness does afford readers the space to relish Groff's mastery of pen, it also results in stretches that can feel lost in the language, with the author's typical psychological acuity giving way and the novel's narrative waypoints eventually beginning to feel a little unvaried. VERDICT A fittingly adventurous effort from one of our best writers, but one yielding the growing sense that we've seen that tree before.--Luke Gorham
Excerpts
Excerpts
I. The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles. In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness. Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrabbled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast and over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight. Swifter, girl, she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs moved yet faster. ** These good boots the girl had stolen off the son of a gentleman, a stripling half her age but of equal size, who had died of the smallpox the night before, the rash a rust spreading over the starved bones. These leather gloves and the thick cloak the girl had stolen off her own mistress. She banished the thought of the woman still weeping upon her knees on the frozen ground in the courtyard inside that hellish place. With each step she drew away, everything there loosened its grip on the girl. Yet there was a strange gleam upon the dark ground of the field ahead, and as she moved, she saw it was the undershirt of the soldier who a fortnight earlier had been caught worming his body slow from the horrors of the fort and toward the different horrors of the forest. He had made it halfway to the trees when in silence a shadow that had lain upon the ground grew denser, grew upward, came clear at last as the fearsomest of the men of this country, the warrior two heads taller than the men of the fort, who made himself yet more terrible by wearing upon his shoulders outstretched a broad dark mantle of turkey feathers. He had lifted with one hand the creeping fearful soldier by his hair and had with a knife cut a long wet red mouth into the man's throat. Then he dropped him to spill his heart's blood into the frozen earth and there the dead man lay splayed ignoble. All this time, he had lain unburied, for the soldiers of the settlement had become too weak and too cowardly in their hunger to fetch the body back. She had passed the dead man and his reek had drawn itself out of her nostrils and she was nearly to the woods when she stumbled again, for the thought of these two men gave rise to thoughts of other men who lurked perhaps in the woods, men out there hidden and awaiting her. And now, as she peered before her into the dark of the forest, she saw a man crouching in ambush in ever deeper blacker shadow of each tree, perhaps a man with a knife or an ax or an arrow and cold murder in his eye. She stopped her running for a breath, but she had no choice, she took her courage up again and she ran on. And as she ran each imagined man in passing revealed himself to be mere shadow again. She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time. Think not of it, girl, she told herself, think not of it, else you shall die of grief. And she did not turn back to look upon the gleam of the fort's fires as they painted the night sky above in red. She was unlettered but was deep devout, a good and a pious girl, and she had listened when the ministers read from the holy book, she had tracked their words and taken them whole in long phrases into her knowledge. She had learned the lesson of only forward movement from the wife of Lot, who had glanced backward once as she was fleeing the destruction of sodom and by her weakness and the wrath of god had been transformed to a pillar of salt. Only when she was inside the forest did the wind remove its hands from her cheeks and from under her skirts. It was warmer among the trees but by no means warm. She stopped and pressed her forehead to the rough skin of a pine and the harshness of it on her skin held her there. What light that could have fallen from the sky did not fall at all, as the heavens above were covered by a thickness of cloud. The forest before her was as dense as pitch, though pocks of snow did gleam in the pits of the trees. Her breath was ragged and with effort she quieted it. She let the silence seep back into her, into the forest, and it smoothed over the memory of her crashing footsteps, and she wondered if she had been loud enough to have waked the men of the fort or the original men of this forest. The men known, the men unknown. Either could be creeping near to her even now. She listened over the scrape and bow of the wind, cold trunk rubbing trunk in a tuning of fiddles, but she heard no footsteps and no breaking twigs. Though the lack of sound was no real solace. At last, when her blood calmed in her ears, she heard the stream not far from her, the water rasping under its shell of ice. She pressed forward as fleet and soft as she could, and when under her foot she discovered the slickness of the ice, then the narrow aisle of stony bank where the stream ran swollen in the spring, she followed it northward, grateful to escape the sharp grasping twigs and bushes that snatched at her face and her clothing. ** Into the night the girl ran and ran, and the cold and the dark and the wilderness and her fear and the depth of her losses, all things together, dwindled the self she had once known down to nothing. A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past. It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free. In time, her mind that had been shocked in flight began to move into thinking again. She became aware of eyes upon her. And though she imagined that they were the hostile eyes of men, they were in fact the eyes of the forest itself watching this new form of creature with its wheezing breath and crashing footfall and bitter human reek, all the night birds and the roaming creatures stilled in silent wonderment as the girl went past. And even when the creatures could no longer see or hear the running girl and the last scent of her distress faded in their immediacy from the noses of the crawling beasts, when only a trace of her could be scented upon the leaves and dirt and snow displaced by her feet, the forest's sense of time shuddered and jerked forward, and the rip that the running girl made became healed, and the ordinary business of the creatures' hungers was reawakened behind her. Only hours after she had passed through the forest, she became to them a strange dream barely remembered in the urgencies of the moment. ** It was perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, there was no way to tell, but a long thick expanse of time spent running northward up the stream bank, when the girl saw a deeper darker shine near where her boot fell, a softness of the ice beneath, and she knew it to be water freed from its frozen crust, openly flowing. She bent and took off her leather gloves with her teeth and pressed her unworking hands between her legs until they had thawed enough to bend, then she opened the sack that she had been carrying in one stiff fist, reached in and took the pewter cup she had stolen, dipped it into the running water, and drank deep. The cold sliced down the center of her like the tip of a knife. It made her ache. Her teeth chattered in the bones of her skull. Her stomach, which had been empty these four days, protested at its new fullness of water. She replaced the cup and tied the sack to her waist, lifting her cloak and gowns to put it against her skin so she could feel it on the flesh of her body and would be comforted by having it always near. She wanted to sink down into the small heap of snow to sleep, her head swam and pounded, but she could not do this she knew, and she pressed herself on again, forward, away, farther. And as she ran she prayed in her soul: O god, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light riseth up for the godly, grant me in all my doubts and uncertainties the grace to ask what thou wouldst have me do that the spirit of wisdom may save me from all false choices and that in thy light I may see light and in thy straight path may not stumble. She listened for anything, for the low moan of a night bird as emissary of the divine, a shifting quality of wind that would speak its will to her, but in response there were only the noises of her passage and the cold wind playing against the disinterested forest. And thus she ran again, and while running as soft as she could, she remembered the solace of song and thought perhaps it could heat the edges of her fear until it melted within her. So only inside herself she sang as brightly as she knew how, the spring clad all in gladness doth laugh at winter's sadness fa la la la la la la la la la la and so on. She knew many songs, of course, but this was the only one that came forth to meet her, quite a strange absence of song there was inside her mind, as once a lifetime ago she had been a dancing quipping singing little fool and hundreds of songs she had known. But she knew that a fool could only exist where there was indulgence and freedom enough for laughter and so it was natural that in flight all of her other songs had dissolved. Still, this one song gave what comfort it could, though in such exigency such comfort was small. The moon had begun to show its face and the woods were bands of light and dark with snow passing in its streaks beneath. Something tore in the skies above and the new downsifting snow was no longer needles of ice as it had been when she had first escaped the fort but had become now soft slow flakes that began to collect upon the old surface of snow and to obscure the steps she had made behind her. Thank you good snow for your aid, the girl thought. Press on, girl, the snow said, in falling. ** It was not long afterward that the voices descended to her from the sky. At first, she could not distinguish what they said, but soon they spoke to her louder and slid into the mistress's tones, scolding. Wicked sprite, verminous bit of stuff, thou last least unlettered Zed, who fled thy duty in thy mistress's worst need. For it is said thou must submit thyself unto the elder, yea all be subject one to another and be clothed with humility, for god resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble. So the voice of the mistress hissed to her out of the dark forest. And forgetting herself the girl said aloud into the falling snow, Ah but does the good book not say also to escape to the mountains lest ye be consumed? And she laughed because she knew it did say this and that she had won the point. But the forest grew wary at the laugh, this new noise made within its sleeping stillness, and the girl had to slap her own cheek to hush herself and goad her body forward. The mistress's voice fell itself a flake and the girl in her running left it behind her. Excerpted from The Vaster Wilds: A Novel by Lauren Groff All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
