What you need to survive in 1600 America

I was taught that a story can have one or a combination of only three conflicts: man (which includes woman) against man, man against nature, or man against himself. That's it. All conflicts can be put into one of those three buckets.

Lauren Groff's novel The Vaster Wilds is almost entirely the story of a woman against nature. The time is a winter the 1600s; the place is the New World (although the exact location is never identified) including scenes from the character's past in London and shipboard. The central character is a young servant girl, perhaps 15 years old or so when the book opens.

She's never identified by name reflecting her insignificance. She was called Lamentation in the poor house where she lived for the first four years of her life, Zed by her mistress because she was nothing.  

In the opening pages, the girl is slim enough to slip through a crack in the palisade surrounding a New World fort. Native worriers are besieging the fort. The starving settlers have resorted to cannibalism. The child she loved and cared for is dead. The girl has stolen a coat and good boots from dead settlers and has accumulate everything she will need to survive in the wilderness: cup, hatchet, knife, flint, and two coverlets. She a nebulous idea of traveling north and eventually connecting with the French. 

Groff writes brilliantly about the girl's life in the wild, her life in London, her shipboard romance during the crossing (her lover is washed away in a storm), the natural world, and what the girl does to stay alive. I am in awe of her imagination and inventiveness.

Nevertheless, I am not the most sympathetic reader of The Vaster Wilds. By the nature of the book, Groff is writing from the outside. She does a creditable job of inhabiting a 17th century servant girl's consciousness, but I am afraid I was unconvinced. I had problems with the book's weather which seems to change from bitter winter to temperate spring remarkably quickly. And just when the girl is about to starve to death she finds another source of food. Finally, the book might almost be read as an allegory of the colonial settlement of America.

All that said, I am pleased I read it if only for the writing and Groff's creativity.