THE VASTER WILDS by Lauren Groff
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
“She was unlettered but was deep devout, a good and a pious girl, and she had listened when the ministers read from the holy book, she had tracked their words and taken them whole in long phrases into her knowledge. She had learned the lesson of only forward movement from the wife of Lot, who had glanced backward once as she was fleeing the destruction of sodom and by her weakness and the wrath of god had been transformed to a pillar of salt.”
TITLE—The Vaster Wilds
AUTHOR—Lauren Groff
AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR—January LaVoy
PUBLISHED—2023
PUBLISHER—Riverhead Books
GENRE—literary historical fiction
SETTING—the “New World” on Powhatan & Piscataway lands in the early 17th c., including the Jamestown settlement, with flashbacks to Elizabethan England & the ship crossing
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—survival in the wild, epidemic illness (plague, pox, etc.), Elizabethan society, white settler mindset, colonialism & colonist migration, the brutality of settlement life, Christianity as an a-spiritual & a-natural religion, isolation vs community, sin & virtue, orphan → adopted daughter → servant → outcast, the sentience of animals, trees, river, stone, & even things/tools (themselves made from natural materials), guilt & self-punishment, understanding & acceptance, peace & death
”Through the holes, the dazzling bright sun poked its long pale fingers and touched the ground, and the trees that the light suddenly singled out from the rest appeared so perfect, such pristine exemplars of their species, that she did not know how she did not see each tree’s perfect beauty before this moment. It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world, said the voice in her mind. Yes, she said aloud, for now she did see the sin in full.”
My thoughts:
This book was selected as the July bookclub read for the Archaeo Bookclub & I was not excited about it. I read a bunch of reviews (which I’m now wondering like what book those folks actually read…🤔) & a couple of articles & interviews with the author & had sort of decided *not* to read it unless I happened to magically have some time towards the end of the month to fit it in. & then the bookclub ended up pushing the discussion back a week & I did have time & so I felt like that was a sign. I also had honestly started to get curious about it, especially after just finishing Butler’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER.
And wow, stick this book on the “boy-was-I-wrong-about-this-one” shelf because I *loved* it. Very similar to Butler’s novel in terms of its function as a sort of highly literary thought-experiment, the book explores themes of certain human societies’ disconnection from nature & as such, from “God.” We are called to reconsider ideas about sin, love, gender roles, duty, fate, God’s will, sociocultural conditioning, the soul, death, the trauma of existence as a non-cis-[white-/English]man under patriarchy, classism, & the insidious nature of propaganda & manipulation of the mind through religion.
The arc of Lamentations’s character development was entirely interior—both intellectually & spiritually speaking—& even though during my reading experience I had my doubts about where the book was going, by the end I found the entire project to be utterly convincing & philosophically solid. In fact, this book has imo succeeded in engaging in the kind of thought experiment that I had been thinking about for some time, even before I read Jennings’s FLYAWAY, & I am very grateful to Groff for the extensive amount of research, thought, & consideration that she clearly put into this work as I think she has accomplished something truly special here.
As I mentioned I had just read PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E Butler directly before reading VASTER WILDS & the conversation between the two is *so* interesting… The differences & similarities between the ways the two MCs process their dire situations in their communities & their conception of God, & sin, & Nature, & other people was so fascinating & the mutual arrival at the idea that “God is change” was such a great ah-ha! moment for me. Highly recommend them as a paired reading—particularly since Groff’s story is a hypothetical historical perspective & Butler’s is a hypothetical future perspective, & both came across as powerfully, indeed, even eerily convincing.
Another book that I thought of while reading this one, as I said, was Kathleen Jennings’s FLYAWAY which features a white settler community in the Bush of Australia whose relationship with the non-native (to them) environment brings up a lot of similar themes & consequences. Particularly I am curious about the way some white settlers come to realize the truth behind the nature of their/their people’s effect on the worlds they invade & colonize, & particularly their lack of spiritual attachment & indeed a-spiritual “religions,” as well as the feelings & choices those realizations inspire.
Oh I also had the thought at one point that Groff had heard someone bragging about how well they’d manage to “survive” in the “wild” & so it made her want to write this book so she could be like “ya sure about that?” It’s a gross oversimplification of what this book ultimately was but I did have that thought…
I would recommend this book to readers who also find these themes interesting & aren’t looking for a clean sort of plot-focused story but more of an intellectual experiment & can handle a lot of pretty graphic (though, like in Butler’s novel, not gratuitous) imagery. This book is best read as close to nature as you can manage tbh because otherwise I imagine it could feel even more super super bleak. 😅
Actually, what was wild for me was getting to the point where the narrator mentioned the Piscataway people whose land the MC was traveling through & I sort of realized with a start that I currently live on ancestral Piscataway land, & quite close to the bay & river that Lamentations was traveling up. I didn’t put it together with the mention of the Jamestown settlement because I first learned about that when I was very little & living far away from where I am now so I always associated that place with distance & had completely not realized that it is now a local place to me. 😅 Anyway. That was a crazy thing to realize…
Final note: And speaking of which, the descriptions of the landscape, the enormous size of the trees, the elms!, the rivers, the diversity of the forests & the animals, everything just made me absolutely heartbroken to compare all of that to what is now basically just a sprawl of suburban poison & destruction. *sad*
Yeah I’m going to be thinking about this book for a very very long time.
”For the glory of the world was the glory of such freeness, such gladness, she understood. Sun with earth and water with water and beast with beast. The only thing meant to be alone is the good sun that shines its endlessly giving heat and light, that one great creator who alone can burn against the nothingness.”
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
CW // graphic descriptions of starvation, injuries, death by illness (plague & pox), animal death, cannibalism, & body filth; off-the-page rape
Season: Spring
Music pairing: forest & birdsong ambience soundscapes
Further Reading—
THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON by Lauren Groff—TBR
FATES AND FURIES by Lauren Groff—TBR
PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E Butler
FLYAWAY by Kathleen Jennings
BRAIDING SWEETGRASS by Robin Wall Kimmerer
SOLAR STORMS by Linda Hogan
TREKWAYS OF THE WIND by Nils-Aslaak Valkeapää
AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
TWO OLD WOMEN by Velma Wallis—TBR
I earn commissions from the sponsored links to my shop on bookshop.org which allow me to keep my content like Book Reviews & Reading Lists free to all subscribers. <3
All graphics, images, & photography © Stop and Smell the Books unless otherwise indicated.
Subscribe below to see more of my favorite quotes from this book!
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Stop and Smell the Books to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.