Review: Friendship is key to surviving in ‘The Wilderness’ of young adulthood

Young adulthood might be a more uncertain period than ever before.

With so many more options, it can seem like everyone is on a different path in the period between 20 and 40 years of age as they navigate the buffet of choices that make a life. Some young adults are in cities, trying to make it at a big kid job while looking for love, while others are leaving those very same cities in search of family and stability.

“The Wilderness,” by Angela Flournoy explores how these various pathways affect one group of friends. The incisive, idealistic novel comes a decade after “The Turner House,” Flournoy’s debut at just 30 years old. It won a host of accolades and, notably, was a National Book Award finalist.

Her second novel follows five Black women — Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique and Nakia — over the course of their 20-year friendship, from 2007 to 2027. The book moves between perspectives, coasts and decades of the women’s lives, chronicling their relationships, motherhood, careers and more.

Loss and heartbreak interrupt what is often idealized as a carefree period in a young person’s life. But at the same time it’s a period accompanied by lot of pressure to “become,” whatever that means — perhaps a chef like Nakia, an influencer like Monique, a parent like January or not much of anything at all, like Desiree, who feels she has “failed to launch.”

The novel, which is on the National Book Award fiction longlist, opens with Desiree guiding her grandfather through his final days without the help of her estranged sister Danielle. Caring for him over the years after the death of their mother when they were children meant that Desiree, 22, and now an orphan, was wholly without a plan for her future.

Desiree floats across the country from L.A., a city not the same without her grandfather, to New York. “In New York she’d found herself reaching for pastimes and postures that had nothing to do with who she actually was. Untethered.” There, she finds that a new coast alone isn’t enough to make herself whole.

The friends step up for one another, through grounded bouts with the heartbreak of postpartum depression as well as more existential troubles, like how to make a place for oneself in a world post-pandemic and George Floyd reckoning.

Their presence in each other’s lives makes a dent in those pains, even when they find asking for help is hard.

“Desiree had begun referring to January as family a few years into their friendship, and though she agreed with the sentiment it always made her bashful. Hard to accept that someone could be so up-front about love, so clear about wanting you in their life.”

Each of the women’s points of view felt distinct, though the amount of time with each character across the book’s four parts was uneven. At times the novel felt more like a collection of short stories than one cohesive narrative — until the second half of the book, when two events, one celebratory and one heartbreaking, bring the group together.

“The Wilderness” asks readers to celebrate the power of close adult friendships, not as something that peaks during the start of adulthood, but as something that becomes increasingly important later in life.

By: Angela Flournoy.