The Nothing of God | Dave's Place

The Vaster Wilds a novel by Lauren Groff. Riverhead Books. 253 pp. $28.00 *****

“God is not a Being. God is Being.” –Jon Fosse, Septology

Having read five of her books, I feel safe in saying that Lauren Groff has certain recurring themes, if not obsessions. One is weather disasters of all kinds; the natural world often erupts in her work. She’s obsessed also with plagues, which appear in at least three of her books. She has an interest in human communities, especially utopian communities, or attempts at them. She is fascinated by the natural world in general, and writes about it beautifully. She is open to sex in all its forms, even when the community she’s writing about (like a nunnery) officially opposes it.

I hate to say that she’s anti-male (in her apparently autobiographical stories, her husband is the shining exception, so at least there’s one good man on earth), though in this book her protagonist states that men are more dangerous than bears.[1] Maybe it would be more accurate to say she’s strongly pro-woman, though that certainly doesn’t include every woman, in every circumstance. Though she sets her work in different time periods, it’s obviously alluding to things that are going on now: climate change and climate disasters, pandemics, women standing up to men in a way they haven’t before.

She also has a deep understanding of what I call true religion.[2] She’s not overtly a religious writer, and I don’t know what her background is. But it’s no accident that she has written a novel about a 12^th century nun (who started off utterly skeptical of religion) or that the Amish emerge as heroes in one of her utopian novels. Josephine, her protagonist in Matrix, eventually comes to a deep understanding of religious life. And her semi-unnamed protagonist in The Vaster Wilds, though she has been raised in a primitive and fundamentalist religion, has somehow come to that same understanding, as demonstrated toward the end when she is suffering from a plague-like disease (she believes it is smallpox) and walking feverishly through the woods:

“She walked.

Foot of fire after foot of fire.

Whole body blazing. Alit. Ecstatic.

A step again. A step again.

Into the twilight she walked. Her eyes did not see but she moved unseeing.

Outside her a darkness of night fell.

Inside there was a darkness of the nothing of god.”[3]

So where does this understanding come from, both in Groff and in the character she writes about? I would guess it comes from her affinity for nature, the fact—as mentioned in this article[4]—that she is a long-distance runner and swimmer who spends a great deal of time in the outdoors[5], just as her character has spent fifteen days in the elements, dependent on her own resources. As the first canto of the Dao De Jing tells us, we find the same truth by going outward and inward. Groff has spent years of her writing life going inward. She goes outward by immersing herself in nature.

The Vaster Wilds, then, is right in her wheelhouse. The most brilliant thing about it is that she got the idea to write it at all, because it plays to all her strengths. And though I recently said that Arcadia is her best novel, because of its scope, this book is her deepest, even more so than Matrix. It portrays a woman against the elements, until she becomes a woman deeply with the elements, at one with them no matter what happens.

The novel is set in what I assume to be the 17^th century, colonial times in this country. Our protagonist—most often identified as “the girl”—has escaped her position as a servant to a family who has recently arrived in what I assume to be Virginia. This relocation was the idea of the man of the house, a minister with a pleasing exterior and an impressive delivery who is nevertheless rotten to the core. He hoped to advance his career, but arrives in a place where there’s a deadly plague, famine conditions exist, things are falling apart. The girl is officially the servant of the family’s developmentally disabled daughter, and does love and care for her; she only leaves once the child has died. Leaving that family, escaping into the wilderness, is an incredibly brave act, almost unbelievable in the face of her position in society. But she also has nothing to lose. If the plague doesn’t get her (she apparently has immunity; she hasn’t gotten it while everyone else is falling ill), the famine will.

Food is a primary focus as her journey begins—she hasn’t eaten in four days—along with eluding human beings and predatory animals, and what she finds to eat is stunning. A raw fish frozen in a river. Live grubs from a tree that she takes shelter in. She takes a crack at a spider but doesn’t find it tasty. She fails to kill a fawn that she happens across, but admits that if she had she would have devoured it raw. All of you foodies who buy organic at Whole Foods[6] will have your minds blown by what this woman consumes.

Groff admits in an interview that she was obsessed as a girl not only by books like Robinson Crusoe, but also by books that told how to survive in the wilderness. The girl in this novel has not read such books (though she is literate, and quite intelligent; she became literate despite the fact that her status would have prevented it), but she is incredibly resourceful in dealing with catastrophes and staying alive. In addition to being a novel which portrays the natural world in astonishing detail—Groff is the most nature-conscious novelist since D.H. Lawrence—it is also a thrilling adventure story. You want to turn the pages to find out what happens, but don’t turn them too fast because the writing is so good.

The protagonist of this novel is the lowest of the low. She is a young girl in a patriarchal society, apparently the child of a prostitute, raised in a poorhouse then sold to a society woman who needed a servant. She was scorned, kicked around, physically abused, sexually abused, told that she doesn’t count, that she barely even exists. Somehow it is these very things that give her the resources to undertake this adventure. The woman who hired her wouldn’t have lasted one day in the wilderness. The last shall be first, as the scripture tells us. The meek shall inherit the earth. They inherit it because they have nothing else; they are excluded from the goods of human society. But in having nothing, they wind up with everything, “the darkness of the nothing of god.”

The final 40 pages of this book, those which follow the passage I quoted earlier, are the most sublime in all of Groff’s work. My wife mentioned that some people on Amazon are disgruntled by the way the book ends, but those people should quit watching the Hallmark channel and see that at the end of this novel, this lowly girl has, if not an enlightenment experience, the next thing to it: she sees the full extent of human existence, its horror (some of which she had experienced earlier, and hadn’t told us about) and its heartbreaking beauty. This is a deeply religious view of existence, and displays a great writer at the height of her powers. I read those forty pages and sat there stunned. The next night I read them again.

Apparently Groff has been nominated for the National Book Award on three separate occasions and not yet won. She should win it for this book, but who knows if she’ll be nominated. I’m not sure people understand what she’s done.

She could stop right now and be a great American writer. But I hope she doesn’t.

[1] People may wonder why I don’t take offense at that, since I am, the last time I looked, a man. I would say what I’m sure many others have said, that I know any number of men who are not utterly despicable. At the same time, I have often been embarrassed and ashamed at male behavior, and I recognize what she’s writing as true about men. The first step in changing is owning up to it.

[2] Other people would say deep spirituality, or something like that, but I’ve always found that to be a weak word. A religious writer is one who considers the ultimate questions of life, even if they don’t practice some particular religion.

[3] I sometimes wonder at the synchronicity in my reading. At the same time that I’m reading Groff, I’m reading a Buddhist book about Zen koans entitled Through Forests of Every Color by Joan Sutherland. Her dedication is “for the love of this earth.” She too writes about dark spirituality. She quotes the Dao De Jing: “In the dark, darken further.” She also quotes a student of Dongshan on what he teaches. “The dark way, the bird path, the open hand.”

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/books/lauren-groff-vaster-wilds.html

[5] Her sister is apparently a well-known tri-athlete, and this novel is dedicated to her.

[6] I include myself in this group.