Melanie's Reviews > The Vaster Wilds

Long before there was an American Dream, there was the American Impulse.

A wonder-filled and often childish feeling of audacity, a burning longing to conquer immensity, a daring, joyful, foolish leap into the unknown, a pushing of one’s own self-imposed limits and testing of the waters.

But to even feel the first tingling sensations of this American impulse, the first English settlers needed to burn through their own colonial, pious, zealot, unforgiving, manipulative, god-fearing origins.

The “American” experience, in order to be born, had to suffer and cut through its very own Heart of Darkness.

In her stunning portrait of a young servant girl escaping the fresh Hell that was the first English settlement of Jamestown, Lauren Groff offers us nothing less than a hallucinatory, searingly lyrical, agonizing and ultimately transfixing allegory of this foundational moment in American history.

A spiritual shedding of the skin. An alchemical process. The painful birthing of new truths about one’s place in the world, about solitude and community, about nature’s benevolence and unbiased cruelty, about the flickering span of a human life and the ever-pulsing, ever-moving vaster wilds all around us.

There are many echoes here of writers whom I love, Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard, Jim Harrison, Malcolm Lowry, Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain”, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”, even stirrings of Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”.

A fever-fueled origin story, carried away by all of the elements, brought to life by a writer on fire, an artist at the height of her powers, and sung by a girl whose many given names you will never forget.

Incantatory.