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 and shifts his focus from history to literature, mining myths, Milton, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and more. At its core, it is a story about stories—the tales we tell each other, our children, and ourselves.
The novel is a linear account of a year in the life of a contemporary family. On the surface, it may seem a step back from the scope of North Woods, which spanned centuries in a polyphony of forms. But as one of its three baroque epigraphs suggests: 'for every terrestrial stream, there run a thousand below the earth. For each pond, a hundred inner seas.' The action is driven by characters' compulsive need to dig deeper—into physical and metaphorical landscapes for meaning, inspiration, or just for fun. Sometimes the digging is literal; often it is metaphorical, and occasionally the boundary between the two blurs.
Plot and Characters
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) moves 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 into her new college; the children make friends; the house holds no surprises. The forest is filled with wildlife, and at its edges are baseball fields with real grass and affordable lemonade stands. The family is happy, and Miles is happy too.
But Miles is not fully grounded. He plans to finally finish his PhD on Russian folktales—12 years overdue due to his tendency to switch focus. Vermont offers distractions: he strides through woods and fords streams like a modern-day Walt Whitman. The people of Vermont are as rich as the wildlife. He falls in with a band of eccentrics: an exterminator ('the Rat Man of Vermont') who waxes about 'Super-Rat-Lines'; a biochemist turned orchardist who introduces scything; a scooter-riding photographer of snowflakes; and a trekking guide named Hugh who may have furnished Beyoncé with a blister cushion.
The Hollow Earth Theory
Hugh believes the Earth is hollow and that a portal to a fabulous underground world exists in Vermont, first discovered by 19th-century pastor Jeremiah Wilkes while walking his dog. Initially, Miles scoffs, but the Wilkes legend has a whole society devoted to its investigation. This rabbit hole of epic proportions draws Miles in.
The risk of such fantastical material collapsing under whimsy is sidestepped by Mason. The surface structures may be sugar-spun, but the novel's foundations are solid, with roots in a tangled web of stories. The esoteric is counterbalanced by the mundane; family life is as worthy of investigation as underground caverns. The prose is witty and gorgeous, calling to mind Nabokov's comic masterpiece Pnin. This is a joyful book—and the deeper you dig, the more joyful it becomes.
Country People by Daniel Mason is published by John Murray (£20).
