I loved reading North Woods. Not everybody at book club did. There were even DNFs. I suppose it’s not an easy book and it is rather literary. But I thought it was exciting, very beautiful in its prose, unique, and well-executed. I will be looking into Daniel Mason’s other books and waiting for the next one. This one is going on my Favorites list.

In the early days after the Europeans “settled” the land that would one day be Massachusetts, a Puritan woman and man run away from their colony and make their home in a valley. Over the next many seasons, they are succeeded on the land by a great number of living things: plants, animals, people. Victims and rascals. Many things that change the land or scar it. Sometimes things that happen far away from the land affect it. And so goes the march of hundreds of seasons across one small space on the surface of a much bigger world.

I read this book for book club. My reading it is a dramatic story in itself. I was new to this particular book club last springtime and the members were scheduling their next reads. In order to recommend a book, (as in many book clubs) you have to have already read it. So, someone recommended this book. Then I seconded it, saying that I hadn’t read it but that I really wanted to since it was one of the New York Times Best Books of 2023, a finalist for the Pulitzer, and I had been seeing it around. From that point on, every time the book would get mentioned (like “We’re reading this in September”), one lady would figuratively pounce at me: “It’s gonna be your fault if this is a terrible book!” To which I would say, “I haven’t even read it!” No one ever came to my rescue to claim they had actually recommended it. I understand their predicament; it was a lot of weight to carry. However, by the time we got to the book club (and the recommender finally confessed), I arrived with North Woods in my hand like a sword which I would use to vanquish any naysayers. I was its biggest champion though I hadn’t known I would be. Was it because I had been positioned to defend it? I really don’t think so.

Let us first discuss what this book is. If you have read any blurbs about it, you might be confused by my blurb above. But I wanted to be clear: this book is about land. (And themes. And metaphorically, the United States.) It is not first and foremost about the characters in the story. It is not a book about a house (though a house features in it and could be called a character). It is not about apple trees. (Though also dominantly featured.) Those things are all there, but I read it like it was about the land and I believe that it improved my reading—it made things make more sense. As for structure, this book is a chronological hodgepodge of POVs, documents, and voices. Each section could he a short story (or essay poem or song) unto itself. But if you see it as short stories, then it is a novel through short stories. Personally, I think it is a straight-up novel constructed in an alternative way. With the land as the main character. And unlike many authors, Mason pulls off a number of different voices, different personalities and styles from different centuries, very well. And they are all woven together so that there IS a plot, just a crazy one.

I agree with some people that it would have been nice to have some dates. It seems like Mason purposefully gave us clues to approximate timing but wanted to steer clear of specifics. I wonder if this is intentional, because the land wouldn’t be dated like that: it’s the seasons and the geological eras that matter. The problem is that it makes it more difficult for the reader to see the settings and even characters in their head without that reference point. And sometimes I’d be merrily reading along with, say, some flappers in my head and then realize with a clue that we were still in Victorian times. I think. Everyone had to change clothes, suddenly, and come back to the stage of my imagination. And also things were different in different decades, so sometimes that mattered, too. What were the norms? What were the rules? How does this story make sense in context? In human history?

Perhaps seeing the land as the main character helps because there are few, if any, likable human characters in this book. Though there are many interesting characters. Some people at book club found they enjoyed reading the despicable characters because they were so fascinating. But we have the full breadth of the seven deadly sins and more in the stories of the people. Which is part of the point. Because they’re not ultimately affecting the land in a good way. And also because part of what persists or changes the land is expressed in this book as ghosts.

I don’t know if Mason would want me to tell you that this eventually becomes a ghost story. Slowly. But I found that many of the people who didn’t enjoy the book complained that it was a ghost story and they didn’t see it coming and they didn’t like that idea at all. I was surprised when I got to the conclusive moment of “Oh! Ghost!” but I was very pleasantly surprised. I was like Dang, Mason! I am along for the ride! And then it does develop slowly. And while I want people to have the same slow awakening to this as me, I also think it would have helped a lot of readers at club to know a little bit what to expect. You can go ahead and read the ghosts however you want, but North Woods is, among other things, a ghost story. It reminded me a smidge of Lincoln in the Bardo because of it.

Speaking of which, there is one thing in the book, one big moment in a subplot that I found unbelievable, uncompelling. And it didn’t need to be that way. Without giving spoilers, let’s just say there is this pottery scene that is, let’s face it, weird and not in a good way. Like the most oblique and not-great moments of the book. By making this such a strange and non-dramatic scene, Mason missed an opportunity to foreshadow violence and real depth of negative emotion through violent action. Because he didn’t do that, there is a big moment later when I was surprised (this book is full of surprises), but I was like Nah, not buying it. That came out of nowhere and it totally didn’t need to. I could see where he had been setting me up, but he hadn’t gone far enough, and if he had just done it in the pottery scene—gone there—then it would have been a perfect book.

BTW, I liked the ending. I found it fun and fitting. It changed tone a bit, but when was this book not changing tone? Some readers find the ending a cop-out, a slight of hand. Endings are so hard. But it worked for me.

Also, some readers found this book difficult to read because it is deep in language. Like, some of them plain didn’t know what was happening at times. North Woods is literary. If you don’t like big words, purple prose, and acrobatic sentences, then I guess this isn’t your next read. I like all those things when done well. It is a book brimming with beautiful language. Just brimming.

I am not a fan of the cover. Many are. It did not get me interested.

So strap on your shoes for a trek through different times, voices, species, and even genres. You’re going to meet a lot of interesting plants, animals, and people and most of the people are going to disgust you on some level. They will also intrigue you. There will be death. There will be after-death. There will be amazing apples, catamounts, cold steams, mayhem and murder. There will be beetle sex, adulterous sex, and paranormal sex (only graphic with the beetles). There will be mental illness, family, and boy will there be consequences.

Some books recommended to me as similar-in-some-way are The Overstory by Richard Powers, Barabara Kingsolver in general, and A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman.

Don’t read this ahead of time, but for fun I put together a list of the chapters with their POV. I jotted down the POVs on the table of contents as I went because it helped me think about the book as a whole. (Parentheses mean it’s more of a focus than a POV; often that POV is a character I don’t want to say because it’s kind of a spoiler.)

• One – Puritan lovers
• Anonymous, The “Nightmaids” Letter – old Puritan woman + anonymous woman
• Two – (deer and wolves)
• “Osgood’s Wonder,” Being the Reminiscences of an Apple-Man – Charles Osgood
• Three – Alice and Mary Osgood
• The CATAMOUNT… — (sheep and catamount)
• From “Proverbs and Sayings” – (European seeds)
• Four – (Esther), Phalen, (Alice and Mary’s ghosts)
• The doleful account of the OWL and the SQUIRREL… – (owl and squirrel)
• Letters to E.N. – William Henry Teale
• Five – Portuguese nurse (William)
• A DECEMBER Song… – (ice)
• Six – Anastasia Rossi (the Farnsworths)
• Seven – (winds and chestnut spore blight)
• Case Notes on Robert S. – the doctor (Robert)
• Eight – elm bark beetle (Tom and wife)
• Nine – Robert’s mom Lillian
• Murder Most Cold – Jack Dunne (Lillian)
• Ten – Robert’s sister Helen
• An Address to the Historical Society… – Morris Lakeman as an unnamed member of the historical society (the Hills)
• Eleven – Morris
• A Cure for LOVESICKNESS… – Alice, Morris, Mary
• 3 Bd, 2 Ba – real estate listing
• Twelve – Nora
• Succession – Nora

Daniel Mason is an author who has been putting out novels since the early 2000s. His books have won a number of prizes and much praise. A Registry of My Passage Upon This Earth was a finalist for the Pulitzer. He has also had short stories in some big-name publications and won the Pushcart, etc. He is a physician and an assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry. He tends to write about mental illness, history, and literature.

His website is HERE.

His other books are:

• A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth
• The Winter Soldier
• A Far Country
• The Piano Tuner

“Take a man in perfect health, and let him assert against the general opinion, and you will find such man accused of deviancy, or error, or madness” (p29).

“History haunts him who does not honour it” (p39).

“…call a man mad once and he will be forever diligent” (p41).

“There is not a fence that will keep out the porcupine; to try is folly. One must pay one’s taxes, sometimes” (p42).

“And yet to have claimed that a warm spring morning walking over earth carpeted with apple blossoms was somehow the same, substantively, spiritually, as a cold winter noon spent pruning, or a harvest evening heavy with the smell of juice and hay—this would have betrayed an ignorance not only of country life, but of the thousand seasons—of frogsong, of thunderheads, of first thaws—that hid within the canonical Four” (p53).

“…but Mary blamed his theory, and said he know that it was nonsense, but he was in too deep. So he just went piling it with more nonsense, like burying a pile of old manure with fresh” (p61).

“Ah, the whimsy of a God who would deliver water to the earth in the guise of such fine powder!” (p137).

“Nothing is more likely to make me abandon something than to be told to do it” (p137).

“With regard to the beetle, the romp began, as sox romps often do, with carpentry” (p236).

“Man’s a product of his environment, and that’s true for the upright and the sickos alike” (p267).

“…she also found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change” (p368).