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THE VASTER WILDS
by Lauren Groff ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780593418390
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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edited by Lauren Groff with Heidi Pitlor
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New York Times Bestseller
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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by Kristin Hannah
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THE NIGHTINGALE
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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Book Review | ‘The Vaster Wilds’ by Lauren Groff
A Rich, Enthralling Fictional World That’s Not to Be Missed
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In some respects, Lauren Groff’s latest novel is an old-fashioned adventure tale. It begins with a teen girl, “bony and childish small” but quick, smart, and capable of on-the-fly problem-solving, escaping through “a slit too seeming thin for human passage” in “the tall black wall of a palisade.” What “she the girl” is escaping from and who is after her as she races across the frozen wasteland is not immediately clear. It doesn’t matter. Groff, writing better than ever, keeps us by her side and in her mind as the girl hurries ever farther away from the place that has evidently caused her so much pain and fear.
As the story unfolds, often through extended flashbacks, we realize — though we are never told this directly — that the girl is on the run from Jamestown, Virginia, in the famine-stricken winter of 1609 and 1610. Brought to the colony as caretaker to Bess, a sweet, developmentally disabled girl to whom the protagonist is entirely devoted, the girl must reckon with not just the starvation and disease rife in Jamestown, but also Bess’s wealthy but aging and vain mother, and the woman’s new husband, a cruel and hypocritical fire-and-brimstone clergyman. As the events that led to the girl fleeing the fort are gradually revealed, we come to understand why she has chosen the menace of the vaster wilds over the eroded English “civilization” of the Starving Time.
Cold and hunger are the two keynotes of the novel. The loss of a pair of leather gloves is high tragedy, “like a physical blow to her chest,” while warmth from nighttime fires — she has the foresight to bring along a stolen flint — offers a temporary consolation that can seem almost heavenly. Food, and the search for it, is such a powerful motive that by the time the girl happens upon a nest of baby squirrels and roasts them over her fire, the reader probably won’t even squirm. Similarly, when she comes across a narrowing in a river that allows her, like the bears that move in and out of the novel, to capture wild salmon with her hands, you feel her joy and relief at the good fortune of access to so much tasty protein.
The Powhatans, who, like the bears, mostly remain on the edge of the narrative, have rightfully come to lethal blows with the men of Jamestown, but the girl, by virtue of her stature, insignificance, and apparent helplessness, incites neither anger, nor much compassion, on the part of the native people. Indeed, in one instance, when she imagines the lifelong impression she will make on two Powhatan girls, we are told by the narrator that after laughing at the girl, they never think of her again.
If The Vaster Wilds is primarily a page-turning survival yarn, it also very clearly offers Groff an opportunity to reflect on the place of women, not just in early 17th-century North America and Europe (in England she was “called many things, Girl, and Wench, and Fool, and Child, and Zed”), but in the general scheme of the patriarchy. Crossing the ocean, the girl has a shipboard romance with a Dutch apprentice about her own age, who perishes at sea. This lone meeting of compatible minds and bodies contrasts with the many other ill-conceived sexual and romantic relationships described throughout the book. Men in society, the novel argues, will inevitably abuse their power. It is only when the girl escapes their hostile community and enters the natural world that she is able to fully exercise her independence and ingenuity.
Writing a novel set more than four hundred years ago presents an author with obvious linguistic hazards. How do you fashion the language of a story from the time of Shakespeare without sounding like a pretentious nincompoop or some hipper-than-thou avant-gardist? Groff manages this feat — perhaps the most compelling aspect of the novel — by sticking with vivid imagery and concrete nouns and verbs, with just a scintilla of that era’s flair for the dramatic: “When the hailstone melted, it tasted like the forest, all moss and bark, but also of the high and furious cloud that had spat such wrath down upon her.” Whatever you think of Groff’s previous books, and I have been less taken with them than others, do not miss the rich, enthralling fictional world of The Vaster Wilds .
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books .
Editor’s Note: Lauren Groff will be in Santa Barbara in conversation with Pico Iyer on Tuesday, April 9, at UCSB’s Campbell Hall, presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. Click here for more information.
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Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel
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The Vaster Wilds
By Lauren Groff Riverhead: 272 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.
A young woman, scarcely more than a girl, runs into the woods. She’s escaping a settlement, closely resembling Virginia’s Jamestown , of English people who have succumbed to famine and illness.
The young woman heads north, knowing only that Frenchmen live there and she speaks enough of their language to make herself understood. As she runs, walks, stumbles, sleeps and even sails, we learn her backstory. She was bought from an orphanage at age 4 by a goldsmith and his wife, raised as a kind of pet with lessons in singing and dancing and deportment, and given charge of their second child, a daughter with multiple physical and mental challenges. Then there was the grueling trip to the new world, the colony’s collapse and, now, a solo journey that makes up the greater part of this story.
Lauren Groff ’s new novel, “ The Vaster Wilds ,” chases the heels of her previous historical fiction, “ Matrix ,” about another extraordinary woman, based on the medieval poet Marie de France. This book has too little plot — or plenty of it, depending on your perspective. If you believe a novel requires narrative tugs-of-war and dynamic, multicharacter scenes, plentiful pedestrian reads await. This book is about how a person hacks a path home across treacherous landscapes. It’s almost an allegory — maybe it is an allegory — for the writer’s journey.
Review: Lauren Groff’s perfectly timely feminist medieval utopia
In ‘Matrix,’ the acclaimed novelist fleshes out the life of a mysterious medieval nun to build a glorious fantasy of female authority freed from men.
Sept. 7, 2021
Groff’s journey has been studded with accomplishments. Her brilliance is evident across a wide range of fiction, from vivid short stories (her debut, “ The Monsters of Templeton ,” and her second collection, “ Florida ”) to twisty contemporary novels (“Arcadia,” “ Fates and Furies ”) and more recent reinventions of historical genres. She wields words with a surgeon’s precision and a maestro’s passion, never sacrificing craft for art or vice versa. Nor does her intellectual prowess overwhelm her empathy for victims of injustice — particularly women, but really any living creature aiming to survive.
And “Vaster Wilds” is, among other things, a survival story: a step-by-step, sometimes cave-to-cave course in basic first aid and the kinds of skills most of her readers would learn only in scouting troops. Our heroine has the tools: a hatchet, a knife and a flint.
The woman first called Lamentations Callat — both names deriving from traditions that had nothing to do with her origins — gradually reveals that she has dusky skin and one parent from a place other than London. Her adoptive mother, really her owner, says she looks Moorish. While some authors might have shoved these details up front to prompt the contemporary reader, Groff leaves them until much later, placing them only in spots where the young woman would be driven to contemplate her outsiderness.
Lamentations is not an innocent. In her 17th century speech, at times appropriately awkward, she shares that she has killed in order to escape. More telling, however, is an early moment when she finds an unfrozen stream and rummages in her carry bag for “the pewter cup she had stolen.” Survival may depend on more abstract forms of theft. You might borrow your owner’s songs and habits, even come to think of her child as your own, and steal time for yourself; none of us can avoid taking, and perhaps we’re not meant to — that’s the way Lamentations thinks at first.
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And why shouldn’t she? From her earliest memories, she’s been up for grabs. During her first weeks in the woodlands, she thinks about “The men known, the men unknown. Either could be creeping near to her even now.” In her world, women have very little power: over politics and money, sure, but worse, over their own bodies and minds. One of her most vivid memories isn’t of some painful trauma: It’s her owner’s desperate use of toxic primitive cosmetics in advance of a visit from her son and his university friends.
Of course, far worse can happen to girls and women. A man sent to find her turns over the memory of killing a sex worker, “and he had since longed to do it again, he had so loved the strength in his hands and the feel of her windpipe as it collapsed. It took a tremendous amount of strength to strangle a woman to death, it was not a sport of the weak.”
Through a brief and tragic shipboard romance, Groff chooses to restore her protagonist’s faith in love. She also spares her a terrible fate at the hands of a wild man in the woods, a long-lost survivor of a Jesuit expedition gone feral. It’s the kind of near-miss that could feel, in unsurer hands, like an anticlimax.
Groff does provide — at least by Groffian standards — an action-filled escape sequence by which Lamentations employs all the tools at hand, whether stolen or crudely fashioned. We have followed her through many tribulations, including illness, hunger and exposure to the elements, and we see her make it.
Review: Lauren Groff’s ‘Fates and Furies’ turns the struggles of marriage into art
A marriage is its own enclosed universe, and no one except the two people within it can know its complexities, from its wordless shorthand and built-up resentments to its ingrained loyalty and tenderness.
Sept. 10, 2015
To say so is no plot-spoiler in a story propelled by sheer indomitable will. In fact, suspense, at least of the kind expected by an avid reader of similar adventures, is never the point.
At the risk of reading too much into a book’s front matter, it helps to know that Groff’s sister, to whom she dedicates the book, is superstar triathlete Sarah True . True’s career was derailed for a time by injuries and mental health struggles ; ultimately, she switched to long-distance racing, bounced back and was recently named an Ironman “Goddess.” Lamentations’ story parallels True’s in one way: Her journey is more important than her arrival.
This is not new to Groff’s work, however. Each of her novels bears this theme, whether it centers on a woman’s view of her marriage, a boy’s perspective on communal life, a writer’s attempts to understand her chosen home or a medieval poet who becomes an abbess. Groff’s world is Darwinian, but she doesn’t chronicle the survival of the fittest; she convinces us instead that even the unluckiest among us can find a way to the blessings of peace, quiet and freedom.
Patrick is a freelance critic, podcaster and author of the memoir “Life B.”
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