The subject of Angela Flournoy’s novel, The Wilderness, may seem familiar, that of four affluent women and their friendship over two decades and two cities, New York and Los Angeles. There’s headstrong Nakia; attention-seeking Monique; January, who marries and has children; “caretaker” Desiree whom everyone adores. But nothing in this exaltingly intelligent novel adheres to our expectations. Its characters are not victims of their careers, sexual identity or their blackness, and the pursuit of romance is barely a blip.
Flournoy’s women talk to each other about “[m]oney, food, religion, love, death, vaginas, hair, art, politics, white folks, bowel movements, astrology, anxiety, family”. However, The Wilderness is a novel about interiority, the seeming frankness of its dialogue juxtaposed with uncensored thoughts, letting what is honest glint somewhere in between.
Conventional January (“very into fitting in”) is the most barbed observer; Desiree’s sweetness hides obsessively morbid musings. “I’m just drunk,” Desiree says, while wanting “to drive a screwdriver into her own skull”. As Flournoy’s women mature, we observe them resolve how they are perceived with who they actually are.
The book is exquisite in its style and control. Most chapters happen over a few hours, but, in flashbacks, encapsulate lifetimes. Flournoy’s use of close third-person to relay each character’s perspective is masterful; you never doubt whose head you are in. Moreover, the stream-of-consciousness, while beautifully worded, never gets carried away by lyricism, rooted as it is in the material world.
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Her characters feel rhapsodically about fabrics, hairstyles and the cities in which they live – the Saturday Harlem M10 bus with its “Seventh-Day Adventists looking Sabbath-sharp, aunties in headscarves running errands”; the moment in a Los Angeles evening “when the heat gives up ... the clock shudders forward and suddenly night taps your shoulders”.
Many novels about female friendship are meant to comfort, but The Wilderness ends in a palpable near-future with robot police and curfews. Even as its characters build businesses and vacation in Martinique, menace lurks, made only more chilling by the novel’s humaneness and humour – “the Worst was nipping at society’s collective heels. Atrocities, natural catastrophes, the dissolution of common decency.”
With her blend of intimacy and bleakness, Flournoy has been compared to Toni Morrison, but there’s a touch of Virginia Woolf as well, with her sensitive women in their tasteful, microcosmic world that contains multitudes of fury. Her characters may have overcome the horrors of their historical past, but they face an uncertainty that threatens to swallow the world.
Mei Chin is a writer from New York based in Dublin.
