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.

A Florida author writes brilliant stories set in . . . Florida

I picked up Lauren Groff’s 2018 story collection Florida because I was dazzled by piece of hers in the Summer 2021 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, “Craft and Inspiration, or Serious Play and Moral Ferocity.”

She begins the piece, a slightly modified lecture, by acknowledging the premise is a fallacy, “that in building any kind of creative work, inspiration and craft do not exist in some imaginary oppositional binary, but are rather muddled and confounded into a great inextricable knot, aspects of the same tentative and exploratory and wildly thrilling process.” I was so inspired, I saved the essay and plan to reread it whenever I begin to wonder just what I think I’m doing.

Once I was sensitive to Groff’s name of course I began seeing it elsewhere. She published a new novel, Matrix, last fall. I caught her review of hers in The New York Review of Books and a story in The New Yorker. She’s been around the block a couple times. Her website lists her prizes: The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne. She is s a three-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction (Florida was one of them) and twice for the Kirkus Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

As the quote above hints, she writes scintillating sentences and has the intellectual chops to provide more than surface glitter. Not every one of the eleven stories in Florida is equally brilliant (how could they be?), but even the ones that do not reach the standard of the best are better much of the short fiction to which I am exposed. Consider the first sentence/paragraph of the first story:

“I have somehow become a woman who yells, and because I do not want to be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after dinner and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell.” That one sentence contains an entire novel and—trust me—it gets better. 

Groff tells four of the stories in the first person, and they all star young, or youngish, women. Most are set in Florida; two of the strongest, “Salvador” and “Yport,” are set in Brazil and France where the character has to negotiate only partially successfully the foreign setting and her own perceptions and assumptions.

Not surprisingly for a writer who lives in Florida, Groff is particularly good at conveying really, really bad weather. “The house sucked in a shuddery breath, and the plywood groaned as the windows drew inward. Darkness fell over the world outside. Rain unleashed itself. It was neither freight train nor jet engine nor cataract crashing around me but, rather, everything. The roof roared with water, the window blurred. When the storm cleared, I saw a branch the size of a locomotive cracking off the heritage oak by the lake and falling languorously down, the wet moss floating outstretched like useless dark wings.”

First, I am generally unsympathetic to the pathetic fallacy—“The house sucked a breath . . . rain unleashed itself.” Yet it works. (It works all the way through the book although I was so caught up in the stories, I was not looking for nits to pick.) Second, Groff’s adjectives are just right: “shuddery,” “languorously.” And the final metaphor is wonderful.

I’ve spent time talking about Groff’s writing because I don’t know how to convey the impact of the stories as complete works, and a story’s effect may be entirely individual anyway. (A copout, but there you are.) For the most part I sympathize with the main characters as they negotiate relationships, families, life. More than enjoying their company, they and their author have taught me a few things. (If only don’t be afraid of the pathetic fallacy.)