The Vaster Wild 

by Lauren Groff  

At the outset of Lauren Groff’s remarkable, beautifully-written novel, a slim, small girl, perhaps 17 years old, slips through a narrow gap in a stockade that surrounds an early 17th Century English settlement in the Virginia tidewater. It is a dark moonless night.  Fearful of being pursued, and fearful of the nearby Native Americans, whom the colonists have antagonized, the girl runs, and runs, and runs, plunging into the forested wilderness. Bound to her waist, inside her cloak, is a pouch containing a knife, a flint, a metal cup, and a small hatchet. It is late winter, fading toward spring, but the nights are still very cold. In the woods there are bears.

How will she survive? Where should she go? How can she safely shelter? Keep warm at night? Find sustenance? Deal with the injuries she suffers when she trips and falls? She has no answers,  no experience with any of this.  She knows only that she should keep moving. At one level, that compulsion, and those hard questions, are what this story is about. Hour by hour, then day by day, night by night, Groff immerses us in the girl’s arduous, map-less, dangerous journey. We come to marvel at her courage and resourcefulness in dealing with challenge after challenge.

But Groff has more in mind than this gripping survival story. The girl’s mind often wanders from the physical exigencies of the moment to her past experiences. Bit by bit, almost randomly, we learn she was an orphan, plucked from the poorhouse to be a servant in the house of a moderately successful London goldsmith. His wife draws her into being the nursemaid for her mentally retarded baby daughter. We learn the girl fled the stockade to escape the gruesome starvation and smallpox that was decimating the settlers, including her mistress and then, unbearably for her, the good-natured child she had come to love.

Perhaps most of all, Groff’s novel is about the evolution of this illiterate girl’s thinking as she lives for days without human companionship, as she experiences moments of dread, as she is astonished by moments of ravishing natural beauty. She begins to question the rules and the prayers of the Christian religion that she has been taught. She questions the settlers’ relationships with the people native to this continent. Events compel her to think about the relationship between human beings in general and the beautiful, terrifying, fruitful natural world. In moments of great peril, she thinks about what it might mean to die, and about why we are here. And amidst her loneliness and reflections, lying in the dark in one makeshift shelter or another, she finds most solace and meaning in recalling the two loves she has ever experienced – a decent young Dutch sailor on the ship that brought her across the heaving ocean, and the mentally limited but beautiful and affectionate child she cared for.

As we read all this, we are propelled along by Lauren Groff’s exquisitely-crafted, crystalline sentences. They convey the complexity and harshness and beauty of a  huge wilderness untouched or only barely disturbed by humanity.  And through the example of her brave young heroine,  Groff shows us what human beings at their best can do and think. Some readers may recoil from the relentless grimness of the girl’s struggles. But I found The Vaster Wild inspiring and by the end deeply moving.

-----  Bob Kagan

p.s.  For readers of this who admired Groff’s wonderful previous book, The Matrix, and the strong, smart heroine she created in that novel, I share that admiration. But I think I admire The Vaster Wild even more.