DAniel Mason’s latest novel sees her returning to the lush New England landscape that so enchanted readers in 2023’s acclaimed North Woods. This time, however, he crosses the border from Massachusetts to Vermont – and makes a profound change in the process. Where North Woods delved into history by telling the story of a house and its inhabitants across three centuries, in Country People Mason turned his attention to literature and explored the rich layers of text that form the foundation of his novel, from myth to Milton to Shakespeare to Tolstoy and all points in between. It is, at its core, a story about stories; A story about the stories we tell each other, our children, and ourselves.
It’s something much simpler: a linear account of a year in the life of a contemporary family. On the surface, this might seem like a step back from the scope and ambition of North Woods, which evolved into a polyphony of forms and sounds over hundreds of years. But if Country People teaches us anything, it’s that surfaces are only a fraction of what we’re dealing with – or, to borrow from one of its three, glorious Baroque epitaphs: “For every terrestrial stream, a thousand flow beneath the earth. For every pond, a hundred inland seas.” The book’s action is, in fact, driven by its characters’ compulsive need to dig deep: to immerse themselves in their physical and metaphorical landscapes for meaning, for inspiration, and sometimes just for the hell of it. Sometimes the dig in Country People is literal; Often it is a metaphor. And sometimes – well, sometimes, it turns out that the boundary between the two is not as solid as it might seem at first glance.
Miles Krzelewski—brilliant husband, loving father, truffle-hunting Italian dog owner—is 45. When his wife, a Milton scholar known for the brilliance of her seminars, is offered a visiting professorship in Vermont, the family (Miles, Kate, their children Wesley and Olive, and Giuseppe, the dog) up sticks from California and move across the country to “a new home in a remote forest.” To this group of West Coast city dwellers, Vermont’s waterfalls and conifer trees and deep, dark greens seem mythical, even magical; And at first glance, they appear to be mesmerized by the life they step into. Kate settled into her new college easily. Children start going to school and make friends. “There are no unpleasant surprises” in the new home. The forest is full of wildlife and singing birds, while at its edges, very charmingly, there are baseball fields “where baseball was being played on real grass, not drought-resistant AstroTurf”, and lemonade stands selling lemonade at prices that real people could buy. The family is happy and Miles is happy too.
But, perhaps, he is not completely grounded. The plan was for Miles to use this year to finally complete his PhD on Russian folklore—now 12 years late, thanks to his tendency to focus too much every time a new enthusiasm takes hold of him—but for a man prone to diving into “rabbit holes,” Vermont offers a wealth of distractions. The countryside calls to him and he can’t help but answer: wandering through forests and crossing streams like a modern Walt Whitman. And while, at first, he feels a tickle of anxiety about his lack of companions, it doesn’t last long. It seems that the people of Vermont are as rich and diverse as the wildlife.
Over the course of a few months, Miles becomes involved with a group of picturesque eccentrics, each in the grip of their own enthusiasm. One of them is a local exterminator (“Rat Man of Vermont”) who waxes lyrical about “super-rat-lines”; a biochemist turned gardener who introduces Miles to the joys of scything; a scooter-riding photographer of snowflakes; And a trekking guide named Hugh, who may or may not have once equipped Beyoncé with a blister cushion. Hugh’s idea that the Earth is hollow, and that there is a door to a fantastic world hidden beneath our feet in a corner of Vermont, was first discovered by 19th-century clergyman Jeremiah Wilkes while walking his dog. Initially, Miles scoffed (“The exciting thing was that neither Kate nor Miles, in their entire lives, knew that this was something that a person, a non-medieval person, could believe”), but it turned out that Wilkes’s legend extended beyond Hugh; In fact, there is an entire society dedicated to investigating it. It’s a rabbit hole of epic proportions – an entire cave-system of rabbit holes – and Miles is drawn into it.
Of course, the risk with fantasy material like this is that it collapses under the weight of its own eccentricities. It’s a danger that Mason easily avoids. The surface structures in Country People may be sugar-coated, but the novel’s foundation is solid, and its roots – the tangled and interconnected web of stories that gave rise to its new stories – run much deeper. The esoteric is counterbalanced by the mundane; Family life is considered as worthy of investigation as underground caves; And the whole thing is presented in prose so witty and gorgeous that it reminds one of Nabokov’s comic work Pnin, which is certainly one of the book’s literary backgrounds. Simply put, this is an enjoyable book – and the deeper you dig, the more enjoyable it becomes.
