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Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse)'s Reviews > The Vaster Wilds
The Vaster Wilds
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Let me say first that I love Lauren Groff as a prose stylist. I think there are few people writing today whose language can soar the way Groff’s can, especially when she picks a setting and set of characters that give her the space to wield her amazing talent. Interestingly, I find her at her most powerful in her short stories – somehow these concentrate her sentence-level magic with her storytelling in a perfectly sized container.
I have also loved her novels: Matrix, Fates and Furies, The Monsters of Templeton, and Arcadia. These span settings both contemporary and historical, are well-peopled and interested in characters’ interactions with each other, and take place over decades (I think F&F might be a bit more limited in scope), even lifetimes. They give her a larger canvas on which to balance plot with character with the cinematic quality and potent imagery of her prose.
That said, I found The Vaster Wilds landed somewhere in the murky middle. Novel-length, its plot is thin and it is focused on a single character, the girl.
When I started TVW I was coming off a couple of books with more straightforward writing, and I was immediately swept away by the beauty of Groff’s language. In addition to her usual unique stylings, she also plays with cadence, word choice, and syntax in keeping with TVW’s 17th century setting. (She wrote an early draft in iambic pentameter – as one does, I guess, if one is Lauren Groff).
That sense of astonishment at Groff's writing talent lasted quite some time and gave a great deal of pleasure. I felt viscerally connected to the girl’s struggle to survive – her cold, her hunger, her physical and mental pain – as well as to the beauty and awe-inspiring abundance of the physical environment, and ultimately its indifference.
There is no sentimentality here – it is pure woman against nature stuff, very ‘red in tooth and claw.’ Other than in flashbacks, there is no interaction of any real significance between the girl and other human beings during her journey.
As base level as the girl’s physical torments and needs – food, water, shelter – so too is her emotional world reduced to the simplest elements: fear, anger, sorrow, loneliness. There is not much, if any, emotional or intellectual growth, and no deeper internality or self-insight beyond the girl’s religious musings – though she is described as intelligent beyond that expected from her lack of education and lowly status. The only person the girl shares her thoughts and feelings with is herself (in some cases these are interrogations of herself by herself embodied in objects around her, almost hallucinatory) – but I found this to be a built-in limitation to character development.
While the flashbacks, peppered throughout her journey, flesh out the life the girl lived and, eventually, what caused her to flee into the (vaster) wilds, the journey itself, with which we are centrally occupied, strangely doesn’t provide much forward momentum. (view spoiler)
As a result, as powerful and beautiful as the language is, the story becomes – dare I say it – a bit monotonous. (view spoiler)
I’m glad I read it but this one treads a little too close to being style over substance for me.
I have also loved her novels: Matrix, Fates and Furies, The Monsters of Templeton, and Arcadia. These span settings both contemporary and historical, are well-peopled and interested in characters’ interactions with each other, and take place over decades (I think F&F might be a bit more limited in scope), even lifetimes. They give her a larger canvas on which to balance plot with character with the cinematic quality and potent imagery of her prose.
That said, I found The Vaster Wilds landed somewhere in the murky middle. Novel-length, its plot is thin and it is focused on a single character, the girl.
When I started TVW I was coming off a couple of books with more straightforward writing, and I was immediately swept away by the beauty of Groff’s language. In addition to her usual unique stylings, she also plays with cadence, word choice, and syntax in keeping with TVW’s 17th century setting. (She wrote an early draft in iambic pentameter – as one does, I guess, if one is Lauren Groff).
That sense of astonishment at Groff's writing talent lasted quite some time and gave a great deal of pleasure. I felt viscerally connected to the girl’s struggle to survive – her cold, her hunger, her physical and mental pain – as well as to the beauty and awe-inspiring abundance of the physical environment, and ultimately its indifference.
There is no sentimentality here – it is pure woman against nature stuff, very ‘red in tooth and claw.’ Other than in flashbacks, there is no interaction of any real significance between the girl and other human beings during her journey.
As base level as the girl’s physical torments and needs – food, water, shelter – so too is her emotional world reduced to the simplest elements: fear, anger, sorrow, loneliness. There is not much, if any, emotional or intellectual growth, and no deeper internality or self-insight beyond the girl’s religious musings – though she is described as intelligent beyond that expected from her lack of education and lowly status. The only person the girl shares her thoughts and feelings with is herself (in some cases these are interrogations of herself by herself embodied in objects around her, almost hallucinatory) – but I found this to be a built-in limitation to character development.
While the flashbacks, peppered throughout her journey, flesh out the life the girl lived and, eventually, what caused her to flee into the (vaster) wilds, the journey itself, with which we are centrally occupied, strangely doesn’t provide much forward momentum. (view spoiler)
As a result, as powerful and beautiful as the language is, the story becomes – dare I say it – a bit monotonous. (view spoiler)
I’m glad I read it but this one treads a little too close to being style over substance for me.
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