Teresa's Reviews > The Vaster Wilds

4.5

As with Groff’s previous novel, Matrix, I started her latest without knowing a thing about it. (Or I thought I didn’t; I now see I read Elaine’s review in late October — so much for my memory.) Groff has impressed me with never writing the same book twice, and I’m always interested in seeing where she goes. Because I was surprised that Matrix was historical fiction (of a sort—I argue in my review that it’s ‘historical fantasy’), I was a bit surprised to see she’d gone into the distant past again. But that element is the only comparison to her previous book: different time period, different place, different writing style.

In the early pages I realized this was a survival story, and I wasn’t sure I'd be interested in all the details of what “the girl” (mostly unnamed) has to do as she’s fleeing “civilization” for an unknown reason (revealed later). But at some point I realized that though it is a survival story, it is not an adventure tale (a la Jack London). My brain went to Toni Morrison’s A Mercy—same-ish time period and location, and the protagonist is also a servant, though not enslaved, per se.

With the descriptions of how the girl feels when she literally runs, I was reminded of Groff’s sister. Years ago I’d read somewhere that Groff’s sister is a long-distance runner and, sure enough, the acknowledgments mention her. The endurance of the girl’s body is stretched to its limits and, in a matter of a fortnight or so, her mind too is changed. I imagine some readers may find that some of the girl’s eventual thoughts are more of today, and maybe one or two are jarring in that respect. But while it’s commonplace knowledge that historical fiction inevitably comments on the writer’s own time period, I think it’s important to remember too that not everyone thought the same in a particular time period. For examples, there have always been those against slavery and against destroying the land. Women may have been forced to be subservient to men and their violence, but that doesn’t mean some didn’t work against it. I also think the girl’s changing thoughts illustrate the evolution of reasoning: how a person, especially a young person, can go from accepting what they’ve been told, to completely changing their mind, especially after trauma.

A few days after finishing this, I attended a talk with Groff (and others) at the Ogden Museum (New Orleans) and, while the conversation was labeled “Florida Stories,” I was happy to hear her briefly stated intentions about this novel.