The God of the Woods
Liz Moore
Riverhead Books
In Greek mythology, the god of the woods is Pan, from which we derive the English word panic. It’s a key reference in Philadelphia author Liz Moore’s fifth novel. The central source of panic centres around the disappearance of a thirteen-year-old girl from from Camp Emerson, a tony summer camp in the Adirondacks. The larger sense of panic derives from the missing girl’s status: Barbara Van Laar is the daughter of the camp’s owners. The Van Laar family has been area royalty for generations; the current scion, Barbara’s father, is Peter III. The counsellor of Barbara’s cabin, twenty-three-year-old Louise, and her counsellor-in-training, seventeen-year-old Annabel, have even greater reason to panic, since neither was at her post on the night their young charge went missing.
Barbara’s disappearance takes place in August 1975, fourteen years after her brother, nine-year-old Bear Van Laar, similarly vanished. His body was never found, but a local labourer, Carl Stoddard, was assumed to be the guilty party after he died of a heart attack while in police custody.
Clearly, Moore is interested in working within a Gothic tradition, but her genre tendencies take a back seat here to a more realistic presentation centred on the collision of the upper New York State gentry, emblematized by the Van Laars and their wealthy friends, including John Paul McLellan Sr., the lawyer father of Louise’s violent boyfriend, and the area’s working class, personified in the camp staff and the police who investigate Barbara’s disappearance.
The main law enforcement officer on the case is Judy Luptack, recently promoted to investigator and desperate to prove herself to her self-appointed mentor, senior investigator Denny Hayes. Judy is the focus of much disdain and derision on the part of the Van Laars and her own colleagues for her youth, her inexperience, and her gender. She finds herself repeatedly reminding people of her rank when conducting interviews; this is only the first in a series of heavy-handed social messages Moore attempts to shoehorn into her broader narrative.
Elsewhere, the author provides much commentary on the sense of entitlement that pervades wealthy American families. “Rich people, thought Judy … generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.” This is one of the more subtle observations in the book. Elsewhere, the proselytizing is thudding and intrusive, as in an early passage in which Louise considers her CIT, Annabel:
She’ll fold immediately, Louise thinks. She will unswervingly tell every authority figure everything that happened and everything she knows. She’ll cry on the shoulders of her mother and father, who probably didn’t even understand the poem they named their daughter for, and she’ll be pipelined into Vassar or Radcliffe or Wellesley by her prep school, and she’ll marry the boy her parents have chosen for her – already, she has confessed to Louise, they have one in mind – and she will never, ever think of Louise Donnadieu again, or the fate that will befall Louise, or the trouble Louise will have, for the rest of her life, getting a job, getting housing, supporting her mother, who for seven years now has been unable or unwilling to work. Supporting her little brother, who at eleven has done nothing at all to deserve the life he has been given.
Passages such as this one pepper the narrative, ostensibly to provide a layer of social commentary, but in practice they end up bloating an already lengthy novel. Much better is the observation that the Van Laar private residence, ironically named Self-Reliance after the Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, was built by locally hired labour.
Structurally, Moore’s novel flits around in time and perspective, shuttling between the 1950s and the mid-1970s and encompassing multiple points of view. These include Alice, Bear and Barbara’s mother, who never got over the loss of her first-born and is now addicted to alcohol and pills; Tracy, a young camper who shared a bunk with Barbara; Carl Stoddard, who helped organize the search for Bear before finding himself accused of being behind the child’s disappearance; and Jacob Sluiter, a serial rapist and murderer who has escaped the local prison facility and marauds in the woods surrounding the camp.
The fractured chronology and shifts in perspective are stylistically ambitious, but have the feel of an MFA creative writing exercise extended out to novel length. The resulting narrative shuttles uncertainly between family drama, police procedural, and social critique, never alighting on one or the other long enough to be entirely satisfying. Characters appear more as types than individuals – the pompous family patriarch; the spunky young police officer with something to prove; the haunted, drug addled mother. Moore is also prone to off-putting anachronisms; one character talks about another character’s “triggers,” a currently fashionable psychoanalytical term that no one would have used in that context in 1975. On the level of the prose, clichés abound: the Van Laars’ annual parties “went off without a hitch”; there is “a swarm of activity on the lawn”; one event is “a welcome turn”; a character “looked beside herself with anguish.”
Then there is the resolution, which is actually a double resolution: the wash of Gothic tragedy superseded by something more optimistic. The result of all this is a novel that feels less than the sum of its parts. There is the potential for schadenfreude in the recognition of the lengths a wealthy clan will go to bury their sins, as well as satisfaction in their comeuppance. Until one considers certain recent events in the real world and understands that this might be the most fantastical invention of all in Moore’s nostalgic summertime reverie.