‘The God of the Woods,’ by Liz Moore book review

Tartt’s best-selling debut novel had just lately come out in paperback, and it was my “trip learn” — extra like “trip immersion.” The eerie environment of that novel so affected my temper that, forevermore, California redwoods have been conflated in my thoughts with the darkish forest surrounding a small Vermont school the place a fictional homicide occurred.

This summer time, I as soon as once more felt that all-too-rare sense of being utterly possessed by a narrative as I learn “The God of the Woods,” by Liz Moore. There are some superficial similarities between the 2 novels: Each are intricate narratives that includes younger folks remoted in enclosed worlds — in Tartt’s story, a small cohort of classics college students on the aforementioned school (modeled on Bennington); in Moore’s, a summer time camp inside an enormous forest in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. A way of predetermined doom additionally pervades each books. However essentially the most very important connection for me is the beguiling drive of those two literary suspense novels. For these inclined to its pull, “The God of the Woods,” like “The Secret Historical past,” transports readers so deeply into its richly peopled, ominous world that, for hours, every part else falls away.

There’s greater than a contact of Gothic extra about “The God of The Woods,” starting with the premise that not one however two youngsters from the rich Van Laar household have disappeared, 14 years aside. When the novel opens in August 1975, an Emerson Camp counselor discovers that 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar is lacking from her bunk. Barbara was conceived after the disappearance of her brother in 1961. Peter “Bear” Van Laar, a boy as playful and adventurous as his nickname, was 8 when he vanished from “Self-Reliance,” the Van Laars’ summer time home that adjoins the camp. (The cosseted Van Laar household clearly has a weak point for referencing — if not internalizing — the do-it-yourself gospel of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.) The encircling woods and close by Lake Joan had been searched exhaustively, however no hint of the beloved Bear was ever discovered. Coincidentally, on the time of each disappearances, a convicted serial killer was noticed traipsing across the space. This fiend, named Jacob Sluiter, informally referred to as “Slitter,” belongs to an outdated household who as soon as owned the land holdings that grew to become the Van Laar Protect.

To summarize the plot of “The God of the Woods,” thusly, dangers making this nuanced novel sound like a campfire story generated by AI. (A serial killer! Terrified campers misplaced within the woods!) Relatively than an easy sensational yarn, Moore’s story jumps round non-sequentially from the Nineteen Fifties by the Seventies and is crowded with characters: campers, counselors, the Van Laars and their tony houseguests, townspeople, and native police. All through, Moore’s language is unflaggingly exact. Right here’s her omniscient narrator describing a woman named Tracy, Barbara’s bunkmate, who suffers from low vanity. And little surprise why:

“[Tracy’s] father as soon as informed her casually that she was constructed like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was without delay so merciless and so poetic that it clicked into place round her like a harness.”

As smart as it’s concerning the vulnerability of adolescence, “The God of the Woods” can be chillingly astute concerning the invisible boundaries demarcating social class. Take, as an example, the character of Judyta “Judy” Luptack, a 26-year-old lady from a working-class Polish American household who’s been newly promoted to “junior investigator” on the in any other case all-male police staff looking for Barbara. Stationed contained in the Van Laar mansion, Judy has the more and more pressing want “to pee”:

“She’s not sure what process is. Nowhere in her coaching did she come throughout this actual situation: What do you do if you happen to’re in somebody’s non-public house for hours and hours with no entry to the skin world? Wealthy folks particularly. She doesn’t wish to ask these folks for something. If she had been a person, she’d [go] within the woods.”

Moore’s very good 2020 crime novel, “Lengthy Vivid River,” went deep into problems with dependancy and entrenched poverty whereas exploring the opioid disaster in Philadelphia; “The God of the Woods” heads off into totally different territory — bizarre and uncanny — and but, it too affords robust social criticism. Because it unfolds, “The God of the Woods” turns into increasingly more targeted on how its feminine characters break away — or don’t — of the constraints of their time and social class. Regardless of the case, breaking freed from the spell Moore casts is near unimaginable.

Maureen Corrigan, who’s the e book critic for the NPR program “Contemporary Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown College.