Book Review: ‘The God of the Woods,’ by Liz Moore

THE GOD OF THE WOODS, by Liz Moore

Liz Moore’s “The God of the Woods” opens in nostalgic territory: It’s 1975, and Barbara and Tracy are cabin mates at Camp Emerson in the Adirondacks.

Tracy is 12 and gawky, only there because her father has forced her to attend so he can spend more time with his new girlfriend. (Her parents are divorced — yet another factor that’s adding to Tracy’s feelings of awkwardness and disconnection.) Barbara is a mature and rebellious 13, coolly self-assured and into punk rock. She’s also the only living child of the extremely wealthy family that founded the camp.

As summer progresses from camp’s early days to the annual survival trip to the final dance, the girls form a bond of friendship and fascination, broken only on the morning their counselor wakes up and notices that Barbara’s bunk is empty.

Those of us with fond memories of summer camp (mine was Al-Gon-Quian in northern Michigan) will recognize the way campers enter into intense relationships, test themselves against childhood fears and begin to grow into who they’ll become, all under the less-than-watchful eyes of young counselors concerned with dramas of their own.

When Barbara’s counselor, Louise, realizes that one of her campers is missing, she knows exactly what’s at stake: Barbara is one of the Van Laars. Her summer house looms over the camp. Moore writes of this family, “They function as a distant presence on a hill to the north, frequently sighted local celebrities about whom the children and counselors of Camp Emerson speculate and gossip.”

It turns out that, instead of watching over her charges the night before, Louise was at a clandestine campfire with her secret boyfriend, John Paul McLellan, a godson of the Van Laars. She fears losing her job and having to return to a dismal home life with an alcoholic mother in Shattuck, the drab, working-class hamlet nearby.

“The God of the Woods” moves swiftly from the drama at camp to the shock and horror of Barbara’s mother. Alice hasn’t been particularly close to her daughter, but the girl’s disappearance is eerily reminiscent of an earlier tragedy, when her first child, an 8-year-old son nicknamed Bear, went missing in 1961. He was never found. This staggering loss left Alice a wraith, addicted to sedatives and incapable of mothering Barbara beyond the occasional hectoring at her to eat less and dress better, believing that “part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic.” No matter how often Alice’s husband, Peter, and the local police argue that Barbara is likely a runaway, it’s impossible for Alice to ignore the echoes of that first loss.

Alice isn’t alone; others also see connections between the children’s disappearances. Both occurred during house parties where the Van Laars hosted friends and business associates. The police are a presence, of course, as they were in the days following Bear’s vanishing. It soon becomes clear that, from the stone-faced family to their hung-over guests to the salt-of-the-earth camp directors, everyone has secrets to hide.

But Moore’s novel is more than just a mystery about children lost in the woods. It concerns the relationships between parents and children and haves and have-nots. From the start, it’s clear that Moore is firmly on the side of Louise and all the good-hearted people of Shattuck who spent days trying to find Bear. They get the best lines. A local man jokes that the Van Laars’ summer house is named Self-Reliance despite the fact that the townspeople hauled all the building supplies through rough woods on behalf of Barbara’s great-grandfather. The Van Laars do nothing to correct this impression. As Judy, an ambitious police investigator, muses, rich people “generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”

I wish Moore had painted the reprehensible Van Laars with more nuance; villains are better when we can see ourselves in them, after all. A few red herrings fall away without resolution, and there are some less-than-convincing details. Would an adolescent from Albany, no matter how sophisticated, really be into punk rock in the summer of 1975, a year before the Ramones released their first album and the Sex Pistols put out their first single? Would an old New York family like the Van Laars, with all the ancestral prejudices that implies, really be so entangled, personally and professionally, with the Irish Catholic McLellans?

These are small complaints. Moore’s portrayal of Alice’s maternal devastation is acutely, painfully real. And her fictional summer camp felt as vivid to me as my own (although we did not shower daily as her campers do — perhaps Al-Gon-Quian was simply a grungier place).

There are a lot of ways to get lost, Moore suggests. If you’re lucky, a path in the woods will help you find your way home.

THE GOD OF THE WOODS | By Liz Moore | Riverhead | 496 pp. | $27