Guernica : As a fan of your collection Man V. Not long afterward, the novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was my great pleasure to speak with Diane Cook over video chat about The New Wilderness. Each day, the external world seemed to catch up with Cook’s fictional reality, with everyone from policymakers to partygoers caught up in the everyday calculus of ethics and survival. I would have said the world refracted through these lenses is stranger and truer than our own, but I began reading The New Wilderness at the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It is a kind of frontier novel, where the frontier-the Wilderness State itself-is ultimately shown to be artificial and porous, a romantic construct of the beleaguered City dwellers. It is a coming-of-age novel for feral Agnes, who must learn who she is with and without Bea. It grapples with questions of wilderness and belonging, taking inspiration from and ultimately subverting the genre of nature writing. The New Wilderness is an ecological horror story a mother-daughter love story an ensemble disaster story and much, much more. Reading this novel, I was reminded of the writer Namwali Serpell’s conception of using different genres as lenses, to refract and layer reality. The farther the community roams, the fiercer the power struggles become among its members, and the sharper the cruelty in the name of self-preservation. Nature, however, the true peril lies within. We follow the intrepid, bickering community as they wander through the grand country, crossing treacherous rivers, braving injury, battling hunger and thirst. Together with eighteen other volunteers-the Community-mother and daughter live as nomadic hunter-gatherers, part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature. Bea and her five-year-old daughter, Agnes, seek refuge in the Wilderness State, the last swath of protected land in a future America that is on the brink of environmental collapse. The rest of that collection-featuring stories of baby-stealing bogeymen, flooded post-apocalyptic worlds, unseen monsters feeding on corporate executives-was just as strange, hilarious, and profound.Ĭook’s debut novel, The New Wilderness, lives in the same surreal territory of physical danger and existential dread. Balanced on the knife-edge of absurdity and mortal danger, Cook’s writing manages to be both funny and terrifying at the same time, its soul the darkly transfigured stuff of life itself. Years later, the feeling of being lured into that eerie story-ostensibly about three old friends who get stranded on a lake while on a weekend fishing trip, but really about survival, pettiness, power-remains fresh. I first encountered Diane Cook’s writing in 2014, when I read the title story of her collection Man V.

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook