THE VASTER WILDS by Lauren Groff review

A young servant girl runs away one moonlit night into the unforgiving winter wilderness. She carries little with her—a pair of boots she stole from a dead man, a few meager supplies gathered from her mistress’s household—but she is leaving behind even less. Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds is at its surface a survival story, but it is also the story of a reckoning with God and empire, and of the beauty of a harsh world.

The Vaster Wilds takes place in early colonial America, and the servant girl is escaping a settlement ravaged by smallpox and famine. Although we learn the many names the girl has borne and hated—Lamentations, Zed (for “the least and the littlest” and “the strangest of all the letters of the alphabet”), or simply “Wench”—in the wilderness she is alone, and referred to largely as only “she”. We travel with her through the wilds of America, towards a destination she hopes will be kinder than what she is leaving—a French colony in the north. But it is winter, and the world is difficult to navigate. The girl’s journey is perilous, a constant struggle to find the basic necessities of food, warmth, and shelter, and to evade the people she is sure are after her.

For much of the book, we see the world through the girl’s eyes, and often she is the only human we meet. What we see of her past—her crossing to this continent, living with her mistress and the minister, and what made her run—is told to us in glimpses, when she has a moment to recollect, or remembers something in a fever dream. Much more vivid is the present. The Vaster Wilds is rich with evocative detail—the things the girl can see, hear, smell; the way she must “warm her hands [...] in the hot split of her thighs” so that her frozen fingers can move, the “sweet and buttery” taste of fish in her “rejoicing mouth”. There’s much bodily detail as the girl’s stomach adjusts and re-adjusts to her new diet, and as she seeks shelter in caves and in the trunks of trees. Although the girl traverses the wild alone, Groff injects life into the world all around her. There are, of course, the animals who also inhabit the wild, squirrels and birds and larger predators. But even the inanimate around her take on a life of their own: she hears “the scrape and bow of the wind, cold trunk rubbing trunk in a tuning of fiddles”; her sack becomes soaked as its “thirsty fabric pulled the water up its sides”. The girl might be journeying the wild alone, but the world around her is filled with movement and life.

When the girl escapes, she does not herself believe she is on her own: she has her God, and thinks he is with her always. Her worldview is structured around the beliefs she was taught: she thinks of the Frenchmen as “foul papists”; to her, the native people of the land are those who “scorned and hated her god”. In one of the very brief interludes that take us away from the girl’s perspective, we meet a violent man sent from the settlement to find her, who regards the “violence to fight for a foothold in this place” —a violence enacted upon the people of the land who were there before them—a “godly duty.” Another of her pursuers is a Jesuit priest driven mad by an act of violence. Living in the wild for decades, civility all but forgotten, he begins to believe he has been “directed to the wilderness by the invisible hand of god”.

These perversions of faith are a matter of course in The Vaster Wilds, and something the girl grapples with in her journey. With the opportunity to reflect on the things taught to her and the things she has observed—recollections of the violence enacted upon her, in varying forms, through her life—and as she discovers more of the vividly alive natural world, her physical journey is mirrored by a spiritual one. She sometimes sees dizzying visions, sparked by injury or the effect of fever, but nevertheless enough to make her look at the world anew: watching a fish move deep within a river, she “could almost see something now moving beneath the everyday, the daily, the gray and oppressive stuff of the self”. Her relationship to God is constantly challenged and transformed through the book, as she untangles it from the beliefs of her people and, by extension, of the empire. These aren’t new ideas, but by probing the relationship between religion and empire (and ambition) through one girl’s individual journey, Lauren Groff creates something that is simultaneously rooted in individual story, and timeless.

This timelessness recalls the effect of Lauren Groff’s previous novel, Matrix, the story of 12th century mystic Marie de France, a novel rich in description of dizzying prophetic visions. It also recalls Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, in which we see a utopian commune formed in the 1970s grow and change over decades. In all three novels, Groff eschews grounding facts in favor of focused, character-driven storytelling, allowing the external world to be revealed in glimpses through their perspectives. There’s an almost transcendent quality to these works—in taking care not to anchor them too deeply in time or place, Groff succeeds in emphasizing the impact of the setting on her characters. This is true in The Vaster Wilds for even the smallest details: names of people, places, and faiths are left uncapitalized (“frenchmen”, “jesuit”, “piscataway”, even “god”), a deliberate choice that drives home the link between empire, power, and control.

The Vaster Wilds is harsh and visceral, a survival story to the end, full of threats in the girl’s present and violence in her remembrances of the past. But there is beauty there, too. As the world around her unfreezes, the winter giving way to spring, it shows her what lives underneath. She recalls her brief relationship with a Dutchman on the crossing to America, and imagines him walking alongside her in the wilds. She watches the light filter through the trees, onto the surface of a river. And she is accompanied by her changing god—a bright force she comes to believe animates all life around her. At the start of The Vaster Wilds, she thinks of herself as a “windborne fleck of dust” in a savage, unmoved world; by the end, she thinks of herself as part of its unending beauty.

Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.