by Daniel Mason
Penguin Random House, 2023
In his stunning novel North Woods, Daniel Mason offers a rich, satisfying tale from the northern forest. The protagonist is a house, and its story extends from the seventeenth century to the future. It’s sited in Oakfield, a fictional town in the hills of western Massachusetts. From its beginnings as a rough cabin built by two lovers who ran away from their Puritan colony, the house is reimagined, rebuilt, and repurposed across centuries. Each chapter describes a new era in the history of the house and its inhabitants.
The chain of characters includes Loyalist Charles Osgood and his twin daughters, Mary and Alice, who cultivate prized apples. Later, a young woman and her child who are fleeing slavery hide in the house. They’re followed in turn by a renowned Hudson River School painter, a dallying industrialist, an aging widow and her schizophrenic son, and others. Reflecting the interconnectedness of humans and nature, Mason includes in his roster of vivid characters a vengeful catamount, a pair of amorous beetles, and an owl, which the author describes as “the feather’d silhouette of death.”
There are also ghosts. In Mason’s telling, the people who lived and died in the house remain a part of the place, like doors and plaster. Things get interesting when deceased characters and visitors show up in later chapters. Indeed, a continuing theme of the novel is how the future and the past are linked together.
The “big yellow house” bears witness to the sweep of American history – the conflicts of colonization, the Revolution, early agriculture, slavery, the Gay Nineties, the 1929 Crash, the construction of the Mass Turnpike, the Sixties, and on to the twenty-first century. But Mason doesn’t settle for historical events as context. Drawing on his experience as a physician and professor of psychiatry, the author incorporates psychological and philosophical elements throughout his story. He weaves in the major intellectual movements, showing glimpses of the Enlightenment, the Romantics, the Transcendentalists, Modernism, Post Modernism, and now Metamodernism.
North Woods is as steeped in natural history as it is in human history. The landscape around the big yellow house transforms from virgin forest to cultivated orchards to merino sheep pasture. The native forest is savaged by chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, invasive species, and a changing climate. The pages burst with spring buds and birdsong. Paragraphs are devoted to club mosses, root wads, and peeling bark. A single, lyrical footnote describes the emigration of thistles, dandelions, and Queen Anne’s lace to North America.
Mason writes each chapter in a different style and voice reflecting the language and culture of the era, including several third-person narrators, a first-person reminiscence, a psychiatrist’s case notes, a detective’s true crime column, a realtor’s ad copy, and several epic poems. His rich narrative is illustrated with a fanciful panoply of photos, etchings, historical documents, maps, and music scores.
A friend described North Woods to me as “part Howard Frank Mosher, a bit of Edgar Allen Poe, some Henry James, even a touch of Richard Powers’ The Overstory.” I’d add a dash of Robert Frost’s “The Witch of Coos,” with a side of Aldo Leopold.
Echoing Leopold, Charles Osgood, the novel’s Loyalist orchardist, reflects, “I have come to the opinion, generally, that he who does good to the land shall be protected, while he who trespasses upon her will be met with most violent return.”
This is the first of Mason’s books I have read. Time to get busy reading the others.