Simon & Schuster
Review by Walter Cummins
Valerie Gillis closes the message to her mother that begins the novel Heartwood with this crucial memory: “But for a while, in your arms, the universe was the right size, and I knew where I was.”
Now, years later, at the time she writes those words, Valerie, using her hiking name, Sparrow, has no idea where she is, only that she is lost in the density of Maine’s North Woods, a final stage of the Appalachian Trail. In the midst of living the experience, she is recording it in a journal meant for her mother.
The apparent universe of Amity Gaige’s novel is this overwhelming forest, seemingly swallowing Valerie in the impossibility of rescue. In her helplessness, Valerie’s is just one of the voices revealing the complexity of the quest to find and rescue a forty-three-year-old nurse who had sought to fulfill her identity by walking this two-thousand-mile trail. Where she is trapped–Maine’s Hundred-Mile Wilderness near the end of the journey, is the worst place to be lost–Valerie is just one more directionless hiker imprisoned by walls of vegetation.
Most of those lost are recovered within days, but Valerie is an exception as the duration of her wandering goes on and on, the search involving dozens of Maine game wardens and volunteers, under the leadership of Lt. Bev, a woman on her late fifties, the first of her sex to achieve such a rank and dedicated to proving herself. Her first-person reports of her deepening involvement in the search is the second voice of the novel.
Others speak both directly and indirectly: like the hiker identified as Santo, a fat man of color from the Bronx, who had met Valerie on his own Appalachian quest, his information recorded in interviews; like Lena Kucharski, a woman in her seventies deeply involved in reading books in a retirement home and detached from real people, choosing fiction, until she becomes captivated by news about the search for Valerie. Her sections are told through a narrator. Additional voices are incorporated through the interchanges quoted by the primary tellers, including those of Valerie’s husband and parents.
While the novel’s most overt need is finding Valerie, that aim serves as the source of activating other characters’ personal entrapments. While Valerie is literally lost in a foreboding landscape, each of the others is increasingly aware that they cannot avoid facing their own confinements.
Parents, particularly mothers, figure essentially in these personal dilemmas. Valerie is fundamentally close to hers, with a deep memory of sitting on her lap as a toddler and pressing a hand again her mother’s chest to “feel the center of you—your heartwood, your innermost substance.” The others in the novel lack such parental closeness, their relationships consisting of everything from occasional visits to complete estrangement. Lt. Bev’s mother is dangerously ill, but despite the urgings of her sisters, she devotes herself to the search rather than visiting her mother. Santos’s father mocked his Appalachian Trail choice: “Last thing my pops said to me before I left was ‘You look like shit in those shorts.’” Lena, always a loner, now confined to a motorized wheelchair, in extreme grief, compares Valerie to her long-lost daughter, Christine, also a nurse in her early forties: “Once you see that your daughter suffers, you must acknowledge that you are impotent and perhaps even insufficient as her mother and protector.”
The novel’s situation also brings out the deepest fears of the characters, especially Valerie’s, who associates her small stature with weakness and insignificance, her vulnerability to being seized by a dark force. She wants to be huge, shouting, I WANT TO BE SEEN. She reveals that her profession as a nurse threatened a potential catastrophe each time she faced the fear of entering a hospital and hearing the alarm of codes.
Each of Heartwood’s significant characters encounters their own source of alarm and each faces it down, with Bev articulating the theme of the novel: “Here’s an idea: All emotions start out as love. Later, that love is worked on by the forces of luck and suffering.”
In a brief author’s note, Amity Gaige explains that the novel was inspired by learning about a sixty-six-year-old woman lost on the Appalachian Trail who did not survive. From that fact Gaige invented the novel’s characters and the knots of their personal relationships and their challenge of facing the nightmare of their greatest fears.
