Review: 'Fates and Furies' writer Lauren Groff's new adventure is a gripping survival tale

Lauren Groff's characters are often confronted with physically grueling endeavors. In her "The Vaster Wilds," an accused "murderess" flees from the home where she worked as a servant for a minister's family.

Known by various names — Lamentations, Zed — the woman runs in spite of starvation, shod in the boots of a smallpox victim. Her interiority reveals ferocious intelligence, along with a determination to forget and to forge a new life. Regarding the girl's past — including the loss of her beloved charge, Bess — Groff writes, "Think not of it, girl, she told herself, think not of it, else you shall die of grief."

Set in 1600s Virginia, the novel's concerns are time, memory, survival and story. The protagonist grapples with where her own narrative begins: "A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past. It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free." In the "new world," running north toward what she believes is Canada, she reasons, "Here there is nothing, only land, all the earth and mountains and trees remain innocent of story. This place is itself a sheet of parchment yet to be written upon."

Details of Lamentation's past come when she stops to rest and light a fire, as if slowing the action creates more literal room for backstory. In one of "Fates and Furies" writer Groff's crystalline portraits of the labor of survival, the girl finds a fish frozen in ice, frees it with her hatchet and eats it, after which she imagines drowning and the fish consuming her. Both the cyclical nature of this passage and the general threat of punishment hover over Lamentations as she progresses; indeed, after eating the fish, she becomes ill. As she roasts baby squirrels for food, the novel reports that she "was raised to expect a savior," juxtaposing this expectation with her self-sufficiency.

Groff creates a thrilling journey, in which the loss of a pair of gloves is a devastating development and suspense mounts as Lamentations tries to build a fire or find a dry place to sleep. Some of her memories are horrifically gruesome. A vicious attack is briefly recounted, along with her alleged crime.

Nature is a gift, a threat and, occasionally, a lesson in "The Vaster Wilds." In another of Groff's striking images, Lamentations comes upon a pair of tangled deer antlers and interprets them this way: "locked together so that even when they had lost their strength and given up their anger they could not separate."

The infinitude of this image, its blend of loss and permanence, mirrors the resilient way Lamentations forges ahead.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, whose writing has appeared in American Short Fiction and Harvard Review, is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

The Vaster Wilds

By: Lauren Groff.

Publisher: Riverhead, 253 pages, $28.