The Wilderness
Expansive and intimate ... This is not your generic book club selection, celebrating four friends living, laughing, loving. But if you want a ruminating, clear-eyed look at friendship as a means of survival, this is it ... The rigorous work of authentic friendship asks us if we’re doing all we can for ourselves and the world we live in. Flournoy holds this mirror up to her characters and shows how modern life distorts those images despite everybody’s best intentions ... Galvanizing and sustaining.
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A loose arrangement of vignettes ... Some of the chapters have the scope and roundedness of good short stories ... But most are brief and inconclusive, more like snippet glimpses of the women’s frustrations in love, work and politics. The random skips in time impose an irksome stop-start rhythm on the scenes that enhances the general sensation of stasis. A story twist near the conclusion is meant to be cathartic but feels tacked on.
Incisive, idealistic ... Each of the women’s points of view felt distinct, though the amount of time with each character across the book’s four parts was uneven. At times the novel felt more like a collection of short stories than one cohesive narrative — until the second half of the book, when two events, one celebratory and one heartbreaking, bring the group together.
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