North Woods: A Novel

Deep dive into the history (and mythology) of the north woods. The Berkshires in Western Mass to the Taconics in Eastern New York. Mason even matches writing style to the era. It's an amazing work of his art.

North Woods reminds me a lot of my first read for this year -- the graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire. Both narratives examine the progression of time across a single space, including the lives of the people who come to occupy that space. Here, however, takes a very rigid pov, never varying from its single, immobile lens as if an eternal camera had been planted on a tripod and took a photograph at random moments across the span of tens of thousands of years. North Woods is considerably more intimate, detailing the events around a single cabin across four centuries and over several acres in the woodlands of northern Massachusetts. As is to be expected, we encounter multiple narratives within the novel's 369 pages, and not just human ones. In fact, what makes North Woods exceptional is how well Daniel Mason characterizes everything within his setting so that we come away from it feeling just as connected (if not more so) to the cabin and its environs as we do the characters who come into contact with them.The novel is structured like a series of short stories (one for roughly each month of the year), beginning with a colonial couple who settle in the area after fleeing their puritanical elders to avoid an arranged marriage, then moving, like the passing of the deed, from one owner (and occasional visitor) to the next. Interspersed between these narratives are photographs, drawings, excerpts from a Farmer's Almanac, property listings, and intermittently (seemingly to denote longer passages of time) lyrics to various folk ballads. Even though each occupant's story is relatively brief, Mason uses all of his authorial prowess to give them flesh and blood. There isn't one of them whose wants and fears, hopes, dreams, and dreads that we feel aren't naturally disclosed, all the while masterfully employing language that is reminiscent of each period.Even more impressive is how beautifully and exactingly Mason writes of his setting. As the stories move through their months, we are treated to some of the most lush and detailed descriptions of the woods surrounding the cabin (as well as the changes happening to the cabin itself). Turning these pages is as close to a literal walk through these north woods as you're likely to take, if you were take a walk in them once a month for a year with the purpose of examining the subtle changes in flora and fauna happening around you. But perhaps what is most remarkable is that these descriptions don't just come in large chunks that take readers out of the narrative as we work to plow through them. They are intricately and organically blended into each story, woven into the experiences of the characters as the characters experience their surroundings, creating this sense that we are as much bound by time and place as the beetles and dragonflies, owls and squirrels, beeches and chestnuts.To take matters even further, Mason supplies a thematic counterbalance to this sense of a moment within a moment. He tells us of a certain parasitic spore, for example, whose life cycle depends entirely on chance. It is swept up from its host tree in a gust of wind, is carried into the sky, descends in a raindrop, gets into the fur of a dog who shakes it loose back into the air where it lands on the branch of a chestnut in a spot that had been damaged by the fall of a beech limb. Having landed right in this specific spot, the spore is able to infiltrate the chestnut's defenses, proliferate within, and go on to blight countless other chestnut trees for miles around. Compare this to the apple seed in the stomach of a poisoned Englishman that sprouts into a lucrative orchard many years later. Or the Bible scooped up from the cabin by a runaway slave passing through on her flight to Canada, whose marginal notes are passed from generation to generation until the story they tell are ultimately brought to light. If our corporeal selves exist for only a moment, Mason seems to argue, the smallest, most insignificant of our actions within this moment can have effects that reach far beyond our finite capacity to know them.Unless, of course, we're able to survive our physical existence. And this is where North Woods loses a star from me, surprisingly enough. I had come to this novel entirely aware that it portrayed elements of the supernatural. In fact, it was the review in The New York Times that described North Woods as a kind of biography of a haunted house that made me want to read it! But I was expecting the hauntings to be much more subtle than they are, and I think the novel would be masterclass if they were (or if they were just removed entirely). I like the idea of energies from the past subsisting across time -- like maybe the scent of a long-gone owner being caught briefly in the breeze stirred in an empty room. What we're actually given, though, are things like a ghost from the 1700's materializing during a seance in the early 1900's and asking, "What have you done to my apple trees?" Seriously bro? You've been a conscious being for about 120 years after you've died, and you're still upset about your trees? Like ... you don't have bigger problems? It's almost comical how these spirits appear to some of these characters being still the same people they were when they were alive. I mean, I've only been conscious for 50 years (except when I've been asleep, which totals to about 30 years -- counting naps), and I've probably undergone at least seven total-personality overhauls. It's really quite a shame that an author who's so good at writing about natural things decided to add the supernatural into it. The two don't really seem to mix here, in glaringly noticeable ways.And maybe that's the point? Maybe Mason is arguing that the natural is natural and the supernatural is not, and here's his story to prove it. If so ... that's a weird flex, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't his intent. However, that doesn't mean this book shouldn't be experienced for everything else it has going right with it. Overall, North Woods is an immeasurably beautiful exploration of the inevitability of change, the cyclical nature of time, the persistence of memory, and a treatise on how big things can sprout from small seeds.Just needs a Ghostbuster.Just one.

Extremely unusually for me, I bought this book on Kindle practically sight unseen. I am an inveterate reader of other readers' reviews, as well as an inveterate guarder of my money, and so others' reviews always influence whether or not I'll buy a book. With "North Woods," I read merely the editors' description (the fact that the book had been shortlisted for the Pulitzer in fiction certainly didn't hurt, nor did the very interesting cover, which looks like 300-year-old folk art) and just thought immediately "Yep, I wanna read this."If I hadn't loved this book so much, I don’t think I'd have even attempted to review it here, because it is almost impossible to review it without oversimplying it ... and oversimplification would be a grave disservice to the truly "holy s..t wow" I felt on reading this book, start to finish.For example, I believe it would be an oversimplification to say "North Woods" is only about a house and the generations of people who live in it over the centuries. Yes, on the surface, it is about that ... a pre-Colonial stone cabin in western Massachusetts, initially, the face of which changes over the decades, as do its inhabitants. We have the rebellious young out-of-wedlock Puritan couple escaping the establishment ... the house's nearest next incarnation, which sees a bloody and fatal conflict between English colonists and Native Americans later in the 18th century (with a fundamentally unforgettable image of vegetative growth in the presence of death which sets the stage for the rest of the book, both literally and figuratively) ... next, a former and future Tory soldier who envisions and sees come to pass an orchard ... the twin spinster daughters left to harvest or destroy his vision ... later, a literary romanticist/naturalist who yearns for a love not socially acceptable in his time ... and later in the house's history, a deeply troubled young man billed as a schizophrenic but whose connection with the property may be more than meets the eye ... and further into the years, other characters with other connections to the house and its surrounding property.Each of these characters inhabits the book's narrative for a short period of time, brilliantly underscoring the ephemeral nature of the passage of time and human lifetimes in it. Because to understand this novel as merely a human story would be to fundamentally misunderstand it -- as we also see over the course of the centuries the elements of nature which grow, change, and leave their mark on the property, in glowing and gorgeous imagery. In a beautifully rendered narrativeof the natural world, we meet beetles andsee mushrooms. We foresee what is wrought by an imbalance in nature, in real time yet in the past. We see towering chestnuts and elms which will someday be decimated by blight. We see flocks of passenger pigeons numerous enough to darken the skies, but which the novel's central "yellow house" will see go extinct. We see a mountain lion(s) in eras where that cat had been long since thought to have been extirpated from the region, and we later see it in taxidermied form in this same house. All of these forces, human and non, make their appearances on the book's stage in ways that are thought provoking and, impressively, never heavy-handed. We see humans taking control, nature taking it back, and the constant interplay of this struggle until, at the very end, we get the eerie impression that the narrative has jumped beyond the present time and into a future we haven't yet experienced.And yes, equally subtly (to the point I admit I did have to reread certain passages more than once to be sure I understood), the supernatural does begin to appear halfway or so through the book, and at this point, "North Woods" becomes a ghost story both sweet and savory. And while this may have been off-putting or unexpected to some readers, in my reading, it works, and wonderfully underscores the dynasty of this property and the interconnectedness of all living things which live, grow, fall back, creep forward, die, and then ultimately continue to live upon it, even after their corporeal forms have ceased to exist.It is unfortunate that the reviewer who read, by the sounds of the review, perhaps 15 pages of the book, and called it racist because of a historically accurate depiction of 17th century English colonial views toward Native Americans. Should a character living in the 17th century have spoken or thought like someone from the 21st? That certainly wouldn't make for very accurate historical fiction. Why make a sweeping generalization of a several-hundred-pages long book after admittedly reading only a tiny part of it? Rhetorical...In the meantime, highest praise from this humble reader. "North Woods" will stick with me for a long time.

North Woods is interesting, it's set up as if the house itself is the main character. It follows the history of the home and all of its inhabitants over many years. Because each person who lived there had their own independent story, it felt a little disjointed. I found some segments to be really engaging and others a little boring. However, the evolution of the woods is painted like art, detailed and precise, naturalistic and real. It was really well written. I also loved the ghosts! Charles and his apples till the very end!

Wonderful novel! Very unique, engaging. Quite a page turner.Covers many generations, different methods of print, poetry and illustrations.All very interesting. This is a book I will recommend, save and read again one day.

Que los bosques nos sean eternos.

Loved this beautifully-written novel that weaves together over the years the stories of a number of people who inhabited a certain cabin in the woods. In a way, it’s really the cabin’s story, as it is the leading character throughout. As you read on, Mason slowly reveals the connections that aren’t so readily seen. But once you start to become aware of them, that’s when another layer of magic kicks in. Mason does this with the same talent of Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible, but this book feels a little more accessible, if only because its tales are more concise. Buy it. Read it. Love it. Pass it on!

Sehr spannend geschrieben!

One of my favourite books this year

I can't put this book down. It has an odd start which made me wonder if I wanted to persevere with it, but it's definitely worth reading on because I am now loving it. Lots of stories about the same space in a wood, loosely related as they span several centuries. Magical and engrossinh.