Book Review: ‘Heartwood,’ by Amity Gaige

Though Gaige writes vibrantly about Valerie’s setting (“trees, and more trees, a boreal hall of mirrors”), Valerie herself is less vivid. She’s meh about her loyal (or is he?) husband, Gregory Bouras, but we don’t really see her wrestling with whether or not to leave him and their saccharine, surface-level marriage, a missed opportunity to infuse Valerie with vulnerability (or a refreshing hint of ugliness). She’s traumatized by nursing during Covid, but her pandemic back story never feels as visceral as the trail. And though Gaige writes strikingly about realizing your mother is only human — “No woman is a star. No woman is a god or a tree or a magician” — Valerie never fully reckons with her idolization of Janet.

Fortunately, Bev’s jagged relationship with her mother proves more complex. Even after she became a pioneering female lieutenant, Bev still failed to win approval from her traditional Ma, who considers wardenship unwomanly. (“Do you wish to be a man?” Ma asks in a flashback.) Nonetheless, Bev is married to her job, and she finds fulfillment in her stellar record of finding missing people. “The backcountry is my mother,” she declares. Bev’s an earthy heroine, one whom Gaige imbues with just enough folksiness to be charming. A speech she makes to search volunteers, reminding them that “it’s not always who you’d bet on that makes it,” is especially winning.

The true heartwood of the novel, though, is Lena, an “acquired taste” and total delight in the vein of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. Lena’s senior life is rich with interest, from her virtual friendship with a younger man she meets on a foraging subreddit (they bond over black locust flowers, which he eats “like popcorn”) to her real-life friendship with her fellow retirement-community resident Warren Esterman, who’s clearly in love with her. A scientist to her core, she drives away Christine by treating her like a specimen, but Lena can’t help herself; looking at life through a microscope is her specialty. Lena is one of the novel’s most gripping characters, and fittingly, Gaige gives her one of the more surprising and satisfying arcs of the book.

“Heartwood” absorbs the reader in the subculture and shorthand of “the A.T.,” including “tramily” (trail family), the notion of “hiker midnight” (9 p.m.) and the use of “trail names.” Valerie goes by Sparrow, a childhood nickname from her mother that she reframes during her many lonely hours. “Sparrows are survivors,” she says. Her “trail brother” Ruben Serrano, a.k.a. Santo, a Bronx-bred, self-described “fat” Dominican American man, provides comic relief about the historic whiteness of backpacking. “There’s this moment when they literally don’t understand,” he cracks of fellow hikers. “They’re like, ‘Is that a person of color?’”