North Woods (2023)
By Daniel Mason
Random House, 384 pages.
★★★★
North Woods is easily the most unusual novel I read in 2024. You could call it one homestead, one orchard, and three centuries. You could just as easily call it humans, the natural world, and the supernatural. Or perhaps ecstasy, murder, madness, and decomposition. Any tags you use will say much but not very much about this imaginative work form Daniel Mason.
However you approach it, don’t give up. I nearly did as it didn’t seem to hold together. Characters are dead and reappear, time passes, yet seems elastic. How does a 20th century schizophrenic connect to a Colonial farmer or a 19th century luminist painter? Did I mention the steamy passages on beetle sex? But suddenly I got it and realized I was reading something extraordinary.
It helps to break free of linear history. Insofar as calendar time matters the novel begins in the 1760s when a pair of Puritan lovers, one of whom is a minister, flee from the social strictures of Massachusetts Bay colony and take refuge in the Berkshires woodlands. A veritable microcosm of American history unfolds on the same acres. To the degree that there is a central character, it would be Charles Osgood, a British officer in the French and Indian War who leaves the army and also finds sanctuary in the area, buys the land from a local minister, has several black workers, and raises twin daughters Alice and Mary who are so close they finish one another’s thoughts. Charles is obsessed with fruit, acts the part of a Berkshires Johnny Appleseed, and raises a very special apple that grew from a seed once swallowed by a dead British soldier. The fate of Alice and Mary is unexpected and unsettling.
You name historical character types and they appear in North Woods: Native Americans, slaves and slave catchers, a crime writer, spirit mediums, numerous farmers, librarians, ministers, shopkeepers, pen-pals, professors, a Gilded Age snob, members of a historical society, police, housekeepers, a woman who hears ghosts…. Again, how does all of this meld? Mason has written an epistolary novel, that is, one in which left behind letters, documents, journals, and notes contribute to the novel’s structure. Some of these connect characters in real time; others fold the past and various presents into one. This to say that traces are left from the past. Most New Englanders could read and write–but in this novel we have to be careful with time, as it seems to be leaky.
If you lose your way, I suggest you think of how things connect to three anchors: Osgood, Robert, and Nora. The Osgood sections can seem like a Farmer’s Almanac at times, but fecundity and decay is one of the book’s themes. Robert is diagnosed as schizophrenic (and might be), but as he wanders through the woods with the intent of “stitching” (healing the world) by numbering each tree and stone he encounters, he hears voices. Does he? If time is leaky, is Robert crazy? North Woods opens with a couple and comes to a stunning end with another, Mark and Nora. Nora, a university student, is as obsessed with nature as Osgood was with apples and, as a modern-day person, has a lot of science to back up her fascination with plants and soil. She’s also under psychological care, though, so perhaps she too is mad as a March hare.
I’m sure many of you are far better versed in biology than I, but it is my contention that Mason wants us to contemplate the relationship between decomposition and the law of conservation of mass, but he doesn’t want us to stop there. The unstated question is what about transcendence? What indeed? Does anything ever “disappear?”
Some critics have argued that Mason has so many irons and questions in the fire that there are rather dramatic tonal shifts and foci. I’d call that fair criticism, but I go back to an earlier remark. Stick with this novel; when you get it, you can’t shake it. I’ll leave it to you to determine if North Woods is brilliant or pseudo-intellectual if, of no other reason, I’m not sure!
Rob Weir
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