Lauren Groff’s Latest Is a Lonely Novel of Hunger and Survival (2024)

THE VASTER WILDS, by Lauren Groff

Jamestown, Va., the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, very nearly didn’t survive. A few years into its existence, in the early 1600s, the majority of the population had succumbed to famine and disease. The period known as the Starving Time has taken on allegorical status. Jamestown is the colony that tried too much too soon; that underestimated the harsh climate, the foreign land, its existing, Indigenous population. Pilgrims went in search of heaven and found hell.

Famine gnaws at the center of “The Vaster Wilds,” the fifth novel from the Florida-based author Lauren Groff, a three-time finalist for the National Book Award. Groff’s characters are always in search of a better life; she is a writer animated by problems of community and utopian thinking. But in this unnamed 17th-century colony, fear and hunger have bred only violence. Chronicling a journey made in solitude, the book cleaves closely to the perspective of a servant known only as “the girl,” who has fled the settlement with its prospect of “a certain wretched death” and set out into the wilderness. She begins by robbing the dead and the just-about-alive, bundling useful items into a sack and leaving in the boots of a gentleman’s son, a victim of smallpox. She passes another corpse before she’s even at the tree line — a fellow runaway whose throat was slit by a warrior “of this country.” She knows, then, that there will be danger ahead, but perhaps not so much as she has left behind.

Groff’s novels often account for a character’s entire life, propelling the reader through a cascade of keenly articulated, outward-facing presents, rather than cogitations on the past. “The Vaster Wilds” is much narrower in time frame, taking place over just a few weeks, and more urgent in its objectives. Pursued by threats real and imagined, the girl is driven by a sovereign hunger, and Groff is lyrically, painstakingly attentive to the textures of her craving. The girl finds a nest of baby squirrels and roasts them on a spit; she swallows oysters she finds on the shoreline; she collects berries; she eats grubs; she snuffles mushrooms, only half caring if they are poisonous or hallucinatory. At one point she catches a glut of salmon and smokes what she can’t eat right away, carrying it with her in her sack. She happens upon a beehive and braves its defenders to steal the honey within. For the reader, each paltry meal, each brief respite, is felt as a physical relief.

Every so often, she glimpses members of the local Powhatan population, or the traces they have left behind. Children laugh at her. She sees a woman on the far side of a riverbank and raises her hand in greeting, but nothing comes of it. One of the most rousing chapters involves an interaction with a Spanish hermit, whose moving perspective Groff briefly adopts. We learn that he came to the Americas as a Jesuit missionary, and when his compatriots were massacred, he ran to the forest to hide, living alone for decades. He mutters to himself in Latin, but as he watches the girl, he realizes he has forgotten the word for this non-man. In this unsettling episode, the “wilds” of the title become a kind of inverted Eden, where language is slowly unlearned.