NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason
Three centuries - seven generations - one house in a Massachusetts forest.
For fans of Richard Powers, Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Dillard, Lauren Groff, Willa Cather, Helen Macdonald…
2024 is meant to be my year of backlist. Faulkner to Graham Greene, Toni Morrison to Philip Roth, a bevy of beautiful novels await. Nevertheless, great new fiction is forever launching into the reader-verse and NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason is a WOW for the existential reader with a penchant for intricate prose and plot surprises.
The novel is anchored in a yellow house in the Massachusetts woods, where an orchardist and his daughters settle. Enchanting, at first, but, of course, darkness encroaches and conflict takes center stage. Genesis, recalled. Thoreau and Shakespeare, et al, hovering.
And had they been asked – though they were never asked – they would have both said that there recognition of the differences had arrived one warm September morning of their fifth year in the north woods, when, standing side by side, they’d watched their father ceremoniously pick the first apple of the season, consider it for a moment, and then, with a twinkle in his eye, cry. “For the fairest!” and hold it out to them in his hand.
Time and place are the protagonists. The seasons, the harvests, family and intimate relationships and natural disaster, serve as both context and subtext. Add a series of captivating characters, one after another, among them liberated lovers, a botanist, painter, poet, abolitionist, clairvoyant, true crime writer and merchant, and two sisters you will never forget.
There is a way-faring tree who greeted me this morning clothed in crimson, and yet, as the day went on, revealed a distinct purpling. I caught my breath when I first saw it happen: one leaf and then, above, a second, and then, at once, the rest.
Three centuries, seven generations of the yellow house in the north woods forest fabricate this expansive tale, and one after another perish or prevail, as larger-than-life characters do, at the expense of both past and future. Along the way, Mason depicts the fate of humanity when we respect the symbiosis between all life forms. Or not.
Indifference, … is what one might call the great lesson of the world.
I would also urge you to go back to Mason’s backlist, particularly THE PIANO TUNER his remarkable debut, which linked music to political peace, or the eclectic story collection, A REGISTRY OF MY PASSAGE UPON THE EARTH, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.
Stay tuned for further reviews of the best of the new as well as the best of the backlist. Cheers.