The Vaster Wilds (2023)
By Lauren Groff
Riverhead Books, 255 pages.
★★★★★
In just five novels Lauren Groff has taken us to Cooperstown, Florida, hippie communes, a 12th century nunnery, and Jamestown colony. The Vaster Wilds is about as good as fiction guess gets. You could think of it as Thoreau stripped of romantic notions.
If somewhere in your educational career you were told that the House of Burgesses was the cauldron of American democracy, you were the victim of a hoax. Jamestown was a nightmarish disaster for the first 30 years after the English landed there in 1607. It was controlled by elites on behalf of the Virginia Company, a joint-stock venture funded by London investors. Settlers were charged with finding gold or other marketable commodities.
Most of those in the settlement were forced to go there. Jamestown was a place of "unfreedom": indentured labor, poor people, enslaved Africans and Indians, servants, and orphans. There was no more dangerous place in the world for an English person to be. From its onset Virginia was a place of starvation. Arrogant leaders believed that the native population would feed the colony in exchange for English goods. They might have had a better chance of that had they not warred against Indians. In campaigns that reached the epitome of stupidity, soldiers burned Indian fields even though the Jamestown death rate from starvation hovered at about 80% per year.
The protagonist of The Vaster Fields is a young girl variously called “Girl," "Wench," "Fool," and "Zed.” In England, though, she was the servant of a cultured mistress who taught her how to dance, dress, and read in exchange for taking care of toddler Bess. Groff's novel is short on dialogue but long on poetic evocations. It is not until about 40 pages into the book that we learn the girl's name is Lamentations, or at least that's what she believes as she is an orphan. Lamentations adores Bess and her mistress. Alas, when the mistress is widowed she is wooed by Rev. Callat who becomes stern and cruel. Things erode quickly, but what comes next is even worse when the minister decides to venture to North America. As a servant, Lamentations spends most of her time below decks though she does acquire a lover on the ship, a Dutch glass blower not destined to follow her ashore.
The minister's wife is appalled by filthy, lice-ridden, culturally bereft Jamestown. Lamentations tries to protect Bess but soon the Callats are starving like everyone else in Jamestown. The colony descends into barbarism, the minister becomes even more cruel, and though Lamentation carries his last name she thinks that “Callat was an insult not a name....” Horror besets the colony: murder, thieving, Indian attacks, even cannibalism. As settlers die, Lamentations steals a sack, cloak, flint, two coverlets, and a pewter cup. In her flight through the frosty night she finds a dead soldier and appropriates his boots.
The rest of the book is Lamentations’ attempt to stay alive. She is still a girl but one of determination and adaptability. Because she is alone, the novel is largely narrated by her thoughts. She observes, “The world... was worse than savage, the world was unmoved. It did not care... what happened to her.” Her vague goal is to find the French, having heard on the ship that they were nicer than the English, but she has little idea how far they are from Virginia. You name it, and she faces it: a pursuing bounty hunter, wolves, bears, hunger, a concussion, Indians, hobnails coming through her boots, and the very real threat of death at every turn. If you wonder what she ate, a sample includes baby squirrels plucked from a nest, bark, grubs, and anything else that will staunch her hunger. Along the way, Lamentations loses dogmatic faith for something more primal, her faith paralleling the way she must live. She understands, “There could be no fight in this world, only submission.”
The Vaster Wilds is a short book that reads like an epic. It is a remarkable piece of writing that makes you feel as if you are the voice inside our protagonist's head. In a roundabout way, it is also a book with proto-feminist and environmentalist themes. It will shake your view of early America. I would venture to say it is better history than is found in high school textbooks. I sincerely doubt I will read a better novel this year.
Rob Weir
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