Daniel Mason returns with a new novel set in Vermont
Daniel Mason's latest novel, Country People, returns to the verdant New England landscape that captivated readers of his 2023 acclaimed work North Woods. This time, he crosses the border from Massachusetts into Vermont, shifting focus from historical narrative to the rich seams of literature itself. Where North Woods spanned three centuries of a house and its inhabitants, Country People is a story about stories—the tales we tell each other, our children, and ourselves.
A simpler surface with deeper depths
At first glance, Country People appears simpler: a linear account of a year in the life of a contemporary family. This might seem a step back from the scope of North Woods, which unfolded over hundreds of years in a polyphony of forms. But as one of its three baroque epigraphs notes, “for every terrestrial stream, there run a thousand below the earth. For each pond, a hundred inner seas.” The novel's action is driven by characters' compulsive need to dig deeper—into physical and metaphorical landscapes for meaning, inspiration, or just for the hell of it. Sometimes the digging is literal; often metaphorical, and occasionally the boundary between the two blurs.
Meet the Krzelewski family
Miles Krzelewski—uxorious husband, adoring father, and owner of a truffle-hunting Italian dog—is 45. When his wife Kate, a brilliant Milton scholar, is offered a visiting professorship in Vermont, the family (Miles, Kate, children Wesley and Olive, and dog Giuseppe) uproots from California to “a new house, in a faraway forest.” For these west coast city-dwellers, Vermont's brooks, conifers, and deep green appear mythic. Kate settles smoothly into her new college; the children start school; the house holds no surprises. The forest teems with wildlife, and at its edges are baseball fields with real grass and lemonade stands at affordable prices. The family is happy, and Miles is happy too.
Miles and his rabbit holes
But Miles is not fully grounded. He planned to finish his PhD on Russian folktales—12 years overdue due to his tendency to switch focus—but Vermont offers endless distractions. He strides through woods and fords streams like a modern-day Walt Whitman. Soon, he falls in with a band of picturesque eccentrics: a local exterminator (“the Rat Man of Vermont”) who waxes lyrical about “Super-Rat-Lines”; a biochemist turned orchardist who introduces him to scything; a scooter-riding photographer of snowflakes; and a trekking guide named Hugh who may have once given Beyoncé a blister cushion. Hugh believes the Earth is hollow and that a portal to a fabulous underworld lies hidden in Vermont, first discovered by 19th-century pastor Jeremiah Wilkes while walking his dog. Miles scoffs initially—“the exciting thing was that neither Kate nor Miles, in all their lives, had known this was something a person, a nonmedieval person, could believe”—but the Wilkes legend has a whole society devoted to it. This is a rabbit hole of epic proportions, and Miles is drawn in.
Whimsy balanced by solid foundations
The risk with such fantastical material is that it collapses under whimsy, but Mason sidesteps this pitfall. The surface structures may be sugar-spun, but the novel's foundations are solid, its roots deliciously deep. The esoteric is counterbalanced by the mundane; family life is judged as worthy of investigation as underground caverns. The prose is witty and gorgeous, calling to mind Nabokov's comic masterpiece Pnin, surely another literary antecedent. This is a joyful book—and the deeper you dig, the more joyful it becomes.
