Self-Reliance, Revisited
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead Books, 2024)
Reviewed by Grace Mackey
Though humans and nature are often at odds, humans need nature. In his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.” As all the Romantics knew, nature exceeds our ability to master it, especially as individuals. In her novel, The God of the Woods, Liz Moore presents a forest that demands reverence and humility, and asks, “Who is the god of the woods?”
Upstate New York has long been a place of escape for the people of New York City.The need to breathe clean air and experience nature drove many wealthy people out of the city, at least seasonally, during the Gilded Age. The Adirondack Mountains were deemed the “playground for the wealthy.” The Rockefellers, Guggenheims, and Vanderbilts would spend a week in their luxurious log estates in an effort to escape the city and befriend the rugged wilderness, 300 miles away from their normal lives. These families were seeking something other than what they had on hand in the city.
The elite of the Gilded Age wanted an authentic, upstate experience and supposedly had a concern for preservation. They exclusively used local materials for building to respect the wilderness. Their building materials fit the area, but their lifestyles did not. Frederick Vanderbilt, for example, hired Japanese artisans to construct a Japanese-style cabin, and required his maids to wear kimonos. Adolph Lewisohn wouldn’t vacation in the Adirondacks without a personal stenographer, barber, valet, and, of course, chess partner. Their estates were extensive, often including boathouses, fishing sheds, gazebos, and residences for their caretakers. Still, such luxurious living played a part in preserving what continues to be one of America’s most protected mountain ranges. Even today, visitors and residents can find themselves in remote locations in the Adirondacks, and sometimes, as Liz Moore reveals in God of the Woods, completely lost.
Though it is a popular vacation spot, there are people who call the Adirondack Mountains home. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the area drew members of the lumber, steel, and paper industries alongside the wealthy industrial families, until the 1970s. In the 1970s, the steel mines and the paper mills the Adirondacks’ two main economic drivers at the time, began closing. After World War II, these industries had supported towns in the area but later crumbled under poor management and environmental initiatives. In the aftermath, local families suffered, and a wider chasm formed between them and the wealthy tourists. In God of the Woods, Moore places us in the middle of this social and physical forest, where the wealthy Van Laar family enjoys the area from their preserve, while lacking the familiarity with it that their employees have. Instead of learning the forest, the Van Laars use it to hide their secrets.
The book follows events at Camp Emerson, a children’s camp located on the Van Laar Preserve. The Van Laars are a banking family from Albany who used their wealth to build a family estate named “Self-Reliance.” Moore provides the reader with a range of character perspectives, from a local volunteer firefighter, to a camp counselor, to an insecure teenage girl, to an emotionally neglected, yet filthy rich wife. Moore also jumps between six time-frames in the novel, each of which gives the reader a different perspective on Camp Emerson and its surrounding area: the 1950s, 1961, Winter 1973, June 1975, and August 1975.
By the end, you gather that the Van Laars are anything but self-reliant, and anything but present. Their survival is built off the survival skills of those far more familiar with the woods, such as Vic Hewitt, Camp Emerson’s groundskeeper during the 1960s, and his daughter, caretaker, and the 1975 camp director, T.J. Hewitt. The unlikely bond between the Hewitts, a local family with a humble background, and the Van Laars is complicated further by one detail: the Hewitts have closely witnessed the suspicious disappearance of not one, but two of the Van Laar children.
Moore begins the novel with Barbara Van Laar’s sudden 1975 disappearance from Camp Emerson, a camp located in her backyard every summer of her life. Barbara is Peter and Alice Van Laar’s 13-year-old daughter, who signs up to be a camper at Camp Emerson. Even before her disappearance, Barbara is mysterious. Her mother describes her as disruptive, but to her fellow campers, she is “too interesting to ignore” (36).
It doesn’t take long to recognize the Van Laar family’s dysfunction, but it also doesn’t take long to learn some of the reasons for it. In the 1960s, 8-year-old Bear Van Laar, Barbara’s younger brother, disappeared. Alice Van Laar, Barbara’s mother, has been severely mentally ill ever since, which doesn’t excuse Peter Van Laar’s gaslighting and consistent disappointment in her. But the Van Laar family issues cannot all be chalked up to Bear’s disappearance, either. Peter and Alice’s broken marriage is rooted in a form of misogyny shown in multiple relationships in the novel.
At Camp Emerson, children are given three rules upon arrival, and the third and most important is, “WHEN LOST SIT DOWN AND YELL” (9). But as Barbara’s mystery unfolds, the possibility that she did not get lost, but intended to escape, emerges instead. In trying to get her back, the Van Laars are not just reliant on the townspeople and employees, but the children. They are subject to the will of Barbara’s friends, cabinmates, counselors, and even Barbara herself. For perhaps the first time, Peter and Alice are forced to truly pay attention to Barbara and the woods.
The woods have a leveling effect. In the forest, the female detective, Judyta Luptack, can decode the mystery more than her male supervisor. The local, lower-class Van Hewitt family know the area better than the powerful Van Laars. Children can withhold information from the adults. It is the wild, and human spheres of power are cracked, if not shattered. The Van Laars have no real power in the woods; it brings them down a few notches. As the truth is revealed, those who are oftentimes easily ignored become central to the case. Detective Judyta, who is regularly underestimated, and pays attention to the commonly-ignored subjects of the case better than anyone else will. Moore uses a range of perspectives to address many power dynamics in the 60s and 70s, including class, gender, age and sexuality.
Barbara and Bear’s cases slowly merge in the eyes of Detective Judyta as. As Moore develops her characters, the mystery grows increasingly complex. Not only can Judyta skillfully read people, but she sees the Van Laars with fresh eyes— a rarity on the Preserve and its surrounding towns. The Van Laars’ grip extends to areas surrounding the Preserve, leaving little room for transparency. There is, however, territory that lies out of reach, and children like Barbara can’t help but explore it.
The Van Laars may be out of touch, but they are still human. Moore complicates them with Alice. From the beginning of her and Peter’s young marriage, she feels misplaced. When she loses Bear, she loses something important. Moore writes, “Alice did as she was instructed. She sometimes felt that her entire life was either following orders from those above her in station, or giving them to those below her. Only with her son did she have a connection that existed outside any hierarchy or authority” (111). Even before Barbara disappears, Alice is deemed crazy and sent to a psychiatric hospital. For years, she has claimed to hear Bear calling for her, saying “Mamma” (217). Alice remains stuck in the past, but her delusions may be closer to the truth of Bear and Barabara’s disappearance than the Van Laars’ official explanation.
Moore captures different types of people well, and her characters seem real. She presents a very tangled, drawn-out, mystery that is also entirely possible. In fact, it is almost too possible. The ending is not one you would predict, but it is also harshly realistic, and risks disappointing the reader. Moore’s ability to jump across the ‘60s and ‘70s while still telling a cohesive story is impressive. In the 1960s, Alice has hope that the deep misogyny in her marriage to Peter is changing for the better; by 1962, he has admitted her to a psychiatric facility, and by 1975, he is entirely distant and unfaithful in their marriage. Moore strongly develops her characters and their relationships, but if there is any weakness in her writing, it is spelling out the injustice in the power dynamics when they are already perfectly clear through character interactions. The characters’ internal dialogue too often states mistreatment that the reader can easily detect.
Moore’s reference to Emerson is clearly a nod to 19th century transcendentalist writers like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Ambrose Bronson Alcott, who reacted to intellectualism by insisting on an inherent spirituality in every person that transcends the rational, material world. These writers also had a deep appreciation for nature. In some ways, Moore upholds transcendentalist ideas in The God of the Woods. The Adirondack forest is mysterious and divine in the way transcendentalists believed nature to be. Her characters are similarly secretive and somewhat isolated, which fits the transcendentalist notion that nature mirrors the human soul.
Yet Moore is also on a mission to call out the phonies— those whose self-sufficiency is actually just privilege and power — and equates writers like Thoreau with the Van Laars. Louise, Barbara’s camp counselor, summarizes the collective frustration with people like the Van Laars when describing Walden by Henry David Thoreau: “his self-regard, his tone of superiority, the way he doled out advice so obvious as to be insulting. Here was a rich person playing, thought Louise. There were poor people far more self-sufficient than he was; they just had the grace and self-awareness not to brag about it” (264). Is there more to the woods than meets the human eye? Moore says yes. But her characters that recognize it are not the Thoreaus or the Emersons of the area. They are the people in the background.
Who is the god of the woods? Detective Judyta solves Barbara’s mystery, but she doesn’t answer this question. Moore’s forest is a force of its own, and one that flips human power on itself. The woods can be a refuge, a prison, a hiding place, or a home depending on the character. Moore balances what is almost a mystical setting, with human weakness, sending this message: if the woods is alive, it is not made just for you. In The God of the Woods, the characters that know this are often hiding behind the trees.
Grace Mackey is an Editorial Assistant for Orange Blossom Ordinary. She graduated from Palm Beach Atlantic University with a B.A. in English with a minor in journalism. She has published creative writing in Palm Beach Atlantic's Living Waters Review and Sigma Tau Delta's Rectangle, and was an Editor and writer for The Beacon Today.
