The World of the People by Daniel Mason review – an interesting follow in the North Woods | Fiction

DAniel Mason’s latest novel sees him return to the lush New England landscape that captivated the readers of 2023. North Woods. This time, however, he’s crossing the border from Massachusetts to Vermont — and making a profound difference. Where North Woods was steeped in history, telling the story of the house and its inhabitants over three centuries, in Country People Mason turns to literature and mines a wide range of texts, from fairy tales to Milton to Shakespeare to Tolstoy and everything in between, that form the basis of his book. This is, at its core, a story; the story of the stories we tell each other, and our children, and ourselves.

It’s very simple: the story of a year in the life of a modern family. On the surface, this may seem like a return to the land and a longing for the North Woods, which has been carried over the centuries in many forms of words and phrases. But if Country People teaches us anything, it’s that the surface is only a small part of what we’re experiencing — or, to borrow from one of his three classic, baroque masterpieces: “for every river in the world, there’s a thousand walks under the earth. For every pond, a hundred inland lakes.” The book’s action is driven, in large part, by its authors’ compulsive need to dig deep: to dig into their physical and symbolic forms to reveal meaning, inspiration, and sometimes the hell of it. Sometimes digging into Country People is real; it is often symbolic. And sometimes – well, sometimes, it turns out, the border between the two is not as strong as it might seem at first.

Miles Krzelewski – an ugly man, a loving father, the owner of an Italian dog that hunts for truffles – is 45 years old. When his wife, a Milton scholar who is known for his seminar skills, is offered the opportunity to visit a professor in Vermont, the family (Miles, Kate, their children Wesley and Olive, and Giuseppe, the dog) take sticks from California and travel across the country to “a new home, in a remote forest”. To this group of people living on the west coast, Vermont’s rivers and streams and deep green, deep green seem like a fairy tale, even magical; and the lives they enter seem, at first, to be equally sweet. Kate is settling in well at her new college. The children start school and make friends. The new house “has no surprises”. The forest teems with wildlife and birds, while on its edge, ironically, there are baseball fields “where baseball was played on real grass, not drought-resistant AstroTurf”, and the lemonade represents “selling lemons at prices that real people can afford”. The family is happy, and so is Miles.

But he is not, perhaps, stable. The plan was for Miles to spend a year completing his PhD in Russian history – now 12 years late, due to his tendency to change his mind whenever a new interest strikes him – but for someone dedicated to going down “rabbit holes”, Vermont offers many distractions. The countryside calls to him and he can’t help but answer: walking through the woods and crossing the rivers like a modern Walt Whitman. And while, at first, he feels amused and worried because of the lack of friends, this does not last. Vermonters, it turns out, are as rich and varied as the wildlife.

Over the course of a few months, Miles met a group of beautiful artists, each with their own unique interests. Among them is a local exterminator (“The Rat Man of Vermont”) who sings “Super-Rat-Lines”; a biochemist turned fruit grower who leads Miles to the joys of scything; a scooter-riding artist of snowflakes; and a tour guide named Hugh who may have given Beyoncé a blister cushion. Hugh sees the Earth as empty, and hidden in his corner of Vermont is the gateway to the beautiful world beneath our feet, first discovered by 19th century shepherd Jeremiah Wilkes while out walking his dog. At first, Miles scoffs (“the interesting thing was that neither Kate nor Miles, in all their lives, knew that this was something that a man, a man of ancient times, could believe”), but it seems that the legend of Wilkes goes beyond Hugh; he has an entire team dedicated to his research. It’s a rabbit hole of sorts – a whole cave of rabbit holes – and Miles is drawn into it.

The danger with having something as glamorous as this, of course, is that it collapses under its own weight. This is a trap Mason easily falls into. Above the World People may be made of sugar, but the foundation of this book is solid, and its roots – the tangled and interconnected web that gave rise to its new stories – are deliciously deep. The esoteric is opposed to the mundane; family life is considered as worthy of investigation as underground caves; and everything is presented in prose so intelligent and beautiful that it reminds us of Nabokov Pnin’s graphic art, certainly one of the literary masterpieces of the book. This is, in short, a fun book – and the deeper you dig, the more fun it gets.