Into the Woods

The Vaster Wilds. Lauren Groff. 2023.

As I read this book I kept expecting something different to happen, and only the same things happened - until I got to the end, and I realized everything had happened.

The girl at the center of this small yet enormous novel doesn’t have a real name, nor a real home, nor a real family. She escapes from the starving and disease-ridden Jamestown settlement in what must be 1609 or 1610, and finds a kind of belonging in the wild natural world outside. She survives, alone, for longer than you might think, and then dies in a manner that is at once violent and peaceful. She is very brave, and nobody remembers her.

That’s it. It’s a punishing read, though beautifully written. There is no social separation between the girl and the pure functions of her body - it has needs, and it breaks down slowly and then all at once. She cannot ignore her body, and neither can the reader. I can’t remember the last book I read that had quite so much graphically described shitting - and shitting is the word used, the only one I think you can use. There’s no delicacy, or euphemism; no pretending that starving to death in the forest is anything but what it would have been.

In some ways this is a hopeful novel, in some ways a desperately pessimistic one. The girl ends her life with an acceptance of the transcendent beauty of the natural world, and acceptance of her subsumption within it. She believes there is no god, no afterlife waiting for her, and is peaceful in the knowledge that her body will feed plants and animals after she is gone. She truly achieves a kind of ego-free enlightenment, and it’s beautiful to see.

Yet she is so lonely, and even as she accepts death she knows that she wasn’t meant to end her days like that, alone, with no other people. And the reader knows, must know, that however much this girl's body becomes one with the world around her, as much as the Jamestown settlement will appear to destroy itself, the Europeans will keep coming. They won’t accept the kind of enlightenment that the girl finally finds. They won’t allow the natural world to remain itself. We can see the effects - the wilderness the girl lost herself in is all but gone, as are the people who lived there before the conquest.

The detailed descriptions of starvation, of violence, of cold and disease contained in this novel were almost unbearably sad, not only because of the fact that they happened but because of how easily they could have been avoided. I could only think while reading “we shouldn’t have done this. We should have just stopped coming.” And yet - there is hope. Nature is, finally, welcoming, not hostile. It’s only that the welcome doesn’t always take the form we might expect or want. The welcome might be a welcome into nature itself; it might mean losing what makes us ourselves. Climate change was another thing I thought of while reading, and I found an ironic hope there too. We may die, everything we know may go, but the world will go on. Our bodies will become part of that world, as they began it. There will be life, even if it doesn’t take the form of us.

People may not win, but the world will, and can find peace in that if we let ourselves. I hope we can.