North Woods: A Novel

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Daniel Mason

Literature

Apr 12, 2024

North Woods by Daniel Mason. 2023. Hardbound, with illustrations. 369 pages Like the novel Ulverton, this is the story of a place over the centuries – its occupants and the evolving landscape. The yellow house in the woods of Western Massachusetts (the fictional “Oakfield”) often shelters runaways: a renegade Puritan couple, an escaped slave. Sometimes, characters from prior chapters connect to later sequences. Everyone has their private sorrows, whether it is twin daughters maintaining their father’s apple orchard, a married painter, William Henry Teale, pining for writer and true love, Erasmus Nash, or new inhabitants who sense the spirits of the house and are deemed insane. Each chapter has a different style or voice. The earlier ones, set in the 17th -19th centuries are more formal. There’s a one-way epistolary section, an undelivered lecture, a real estate listing, and songs from the sisters interjected, like scene change music. One of the most entertaining narrators is a hardened detective. If you’ve ever come to a house and felt its layers of history, this is for you. Not only does the novel chronicle the rise and fall of the secluded yellow house but perhaps even more importantly, it records the change of the forest landscape: the apple trees eventually fail, and chestnut trees fall to blight. And there is the almost-mythical catamount (aka cougar) that lies on the cover. The author has been nominated for a Pulitzer, and North Woods was on the New York Times list as one of the top 10 books of the year. But Mason’s day job as a physician and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University. His talent makes me want to fall on my sword. God, I love polymaths.

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Jessica

Dec 13, 2024

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