‘The Wilderness’ is a fascinating look at lasting friendships
Angela Flournoy’s vivid second novel, “The Wilderness,” treats friendship with the dignity and fascination it deserves. During more than two decades, the relationships among Desiree, Nakia, January and Monique withstand stressors of all kinds — geographical distance, philosophical difference, professional aspiration, postpartum distress — but there is no treacly conclusion about the strength of their devotion. Some of the women are closer than others, a discrepancy they manage to endure, as the four share love in all its contradictions and complexities, its capacity to be both uneven and steadfast.
Each member of the quartet — “the girls,” as January refers to them — offers her own point of view, but Desiree emerges as the dominant voice. Though each will suffer loss in the span of the novel — the years range from 2008 to 2027 — Desiree’s losses begin before birth, when her father abandons her pregnant mother and elder sister. Desiree’s mother, Sherelle, declines to give Desiree her father’s last name, a detail that accrues metaphoric heft. “Danielle Joyner … and Desiree Richard … Sisters with surnames that spoke to their mother’s heartbreak, her anger,” Flournoy writes. Heartbreak and anger are part of the sisters’ inheritance.
Inheritance — whether emotional or monetary — plays a key role in this novel. Flournoy addresses the financial status of each character with directness and practicality, and several of the women benefit from access to their family’s wealth. When January cannot afford to join a trip to Martinique, she studies her friends’ social media posts instead: “This was not the first trip the girls had taken without her and it wouldn’t be the last.” Gazing at pictures of her friends’ vacation, at age 32, she concludes that “she hadn’t planned right.”
Flournoy uses the word “plan” so frequently that the novel seems to be exploring the concept of planning itself — both its utility and its limitations. Her characters soothe themselves with the hope that forethought will keep chaos at bay. The opening chapters find Desiree in Europe with her grandfather, whose meticulous schedule fails to dictate the events of their trip. When Desiree’s sister, Danielle, arranges to meet their father in New York — a man she barely remembers, in a city where she doesn’t live — Flournoy writes: “She had planned things so that if they hit it off — imagine! — they’d be able to grab a quick early dinner before she needed to get on her train. She’d even made a reservation.” What a painfully tender phrase — “She’d even made a reservation.” What a quiet expression of hope, to make such a plan.
Instead, she eats sushi alone, “too worried about getting punished for no-showing to cancel.” Having kept Danielle at a distance for much of the novel, Flournoy makes great use of her here. Other characters find her cold, withholding and pious, but her perspective is one of loneliness, of having protected her sister from the horror of their mother’s death, after which “she had been thrust into the wilderness of adult life.”
The wilderness is navigable from within the protective shell of friendship; even so, Flournoy is careful to explore these friendships’ fallibility. Of the foursome, Monique is, by design, the least accessible — not only to Nakia, Desiree and January, but also to the reader. A librarian with a slowly building online presence, she speaks mostly through the posts she has prepared and polished for an audience. There is a performative, self-aware quality to her narration. It is a notable contrast to, for instance, the omniscient narrator who recounts Nakia’s interiority — a cycle of relentless questions that are mostly impossible to answer. It is also a fine display of the way first-person point of view can occlude, just as third-person can clarify.
Except for Monique, who comes to Los Angeles only as a visitor, the women repeatedly move between the East and West Coasts. Flournoy’s descriptions of Los Angeles in particular are incandescent — blending odes to its beauty with fears for its future. (Those fears are sharply portrayed in the novel’s vision of 2027.) In 2012, when Desiree leaves Los Angeles for New York, she counsels herself to “cede the city.” She begins a list: “Cede its smog and cracked sidewalks, its earthquake weather and skinny, parched palms.” As the items unfurl, it becomes clear that her departure — much like her relationships with her family and friends — is full of both love and ambivalence.