[edited on December 18th because i screwed up the title of Matrix.]

i have an unusually high number of half-finished books for me (for reference: i’m usually reading 4-5 books at a time, but i do tend to finish most of them in a timely way) — some that have been unfinished untouched for most of the year. so i thought i’d make some headway on that, either by finishing a book or six or by deciding that some of those books were not for me, not for now.

one of those was Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds, which i found propulsive and engaging when i started it early in the year, but i couldn’t really remember why i hadn’t picked it up (except to dust the table it was on) in months. and having finished it and thought about it for a few days, i think i have a ghost of an answer.

part of the reason i picked up The Vaster Wilds in the first place was because i’d so liked Groff’s previous book, Matrix (which is so, so good — the writing is propulsive, and the novel is so unexpected in its structure), and while VW shares some of those qualities: Groff’s sentences are so good, and the narrator’s voice rings true in an interesting way. in addition, Groff is doing something compelling with time. the interiority of the novel causes the passage of time to seem longer than it takes. however, the inevitability of the narrator’s circumstances begin to make her interior voice less engaging.

(the next few paragraphs contain brief spoilers, if that matters to you)

first, let me be clear, at the start of the novel, when Zed escapes the colony, there seem to be a number of ways this plot could go. there are various ways she could survive, and conversely, there are a number of ways she could die. at some point, midway through the book, the outcome becomes inevitable, and as the novel narrows into the specificity of how Zed will die, the novel’s propulsiveness seems to dissipate. i will say that this choice contributes to the novel’s sense of realism — and the tension between realism and mysticism, because the narrative voice is so interior, is itself compelling, and will bear much more thinking about.

i’m also trying to decide what i think of that. i mean, one answer is that i put the novel down for several months, and that finishing it wasn’t the inviting, propulsive experience the opening half of the novel was. some of that could absolutely be a me problem (between Gaza/ the American election/ climate catastrophe/ the Canadian political shitshow/ the dark, oh god the dark/ everything else — well, it’s weighing on me).

another answer is that the dissipation of propulsiveness is, in fact, what Groff is trying to accomplish — that the last half of the novel differs from the standard expectations (there is no particularly climactic moment — early on, there are a few moments that might, in a different novel, be climactic — nor a satisfying conclusion) because this is, in fact, a novel about the tension between realism and mysticism, and, indeed, a novel about death and strangeness. in which case, putting the reader in conflict with their own expectations of what a novel looks like… — well, that interests me.

indeed, the notion that “reader” is not a natural/neutral question to occupy crosses into a lot of the thinking i’ve been doing about my own writing and what i want to accomplish (which is to say, a certain amount of wanting to bring the reader into a position of calling their own position and assumptions into question). how to do that without causing a reader to throw my work aside in frustration (which is for sure a possible outcome) is a hard question, and one i’m not sure i have a satisfying answer to.

anyway: a couple of recent columns, and the best of 2024 from a number of Winnipeg Free Press reviewers, which include some of mine under poetry, but which also include a number of compelling reads selected by others.