Daniel Mason’s latest novel sees him return to the verdant New England landscape that so captivated readers of 2023’s acclaimed North Woods. This time, though, he hops the border from Massachusetts into Vermont – and effects a deeper shift in the process. Where North Woods was a foray into history, telling the tale of a house and its inhabitants over three centuries, in Country People Mason turns his attention to literature and mines the rich seams of text, from myths to Milton to Shakespeare to Tolstoy and all points in between, that make up his novel’s foundations. This is, at its core, a story about stories; a tale about the tales we tell each other, and our children, and ourselves.
It’s also a far simpler thing: the linear account of a year in the life of a contemporary family. On the surface, this might look like a step back from the scope and ambition of North Woods, which spooled out over hundreds of years in a polyphony of forms and voices. But if Country People teaches us anything, it’s that surfaces are only ever a fraction of what we’re dealing with – or, to borrow from one of its three, gloriously baroque epigraphs: “for every terrestrial stream, there run a thousand below the earth. For each pond, a hundred inner seas.” The book’s action is driven, in fact, by its characters’ compulsive need to dig deeper: to burrow into their physical and metaphorical landscapes for meaning, for inspiration, and on occasion just for the hell of it. Sometimes the digging in Country People is literal; often it’s metaphorical. And occasionally – well, occasionally, it turns out, the boundary between the two isn’t as solid as it might first appear.
Miles Krzelewski – uxorious husband, adoring father, owner of a truffle-hunting Italian dog – is 45 years old. When his wife, a Milton scholar known for the brilliance of her seminars, is offered a visiting professorship in Vermont, the family (Miles, Kate, their children Wesley and Olive, and Giuseppe, the dog) up sticks from California and drive across country to “a new house, in a faraway forest”. For this band of west coast city-dwellers, Vermont’s brooks and conifers and deep, deep green appear mythic, even magical; and the lives they step into seem, at first, to be similarly charmed. Kate settles smoothly into her new college. The children start school and make friends. The new house “holds no untoward surprises”. The forest is filled with wildlife and birdsong, while at its edges, just as enchantingly, are baseball fields “where baseball was being played on true grass, not drought-resistant AstroTurf”, and lemonade stands “selling lemonade at prices that actual people could afford”. The family is happy, and Miles is happy too.
But he is not, perhaps, fully grounded. The plan had been for Miles to use the year to finally finish his PhD on Russian folktales – now 12 years overdue, thanks to his tendency to switch focus every time a new enthusiasm grabs him – but for a man given to diving down “rabbit holes”, Vermont offers a wealth of distractions. The countryside calls to him and he can’t help but answer: striding through woods and fording streams like a modern-day Walt Whitman. And while, just at first, he feels a tickle of concern about his lack of companions, this doesn’t last. The people of Vermont, it transpires, are as rich and varied as the wildlife.
Over the course of a few months, Miles falls in with a band of picturesque eccentrics, each in the grip of their own enthusiasm. Among them are a local exterminator (“the Rat Man of Vermont”) who waxes lyrical about “Super-Rat-Lines”; a biochemist turned orchardist who introduces Miles to the joys of scything; a scooter-riding photographer of snowflakes; and a trekking guide by the name of Hugh who may or may not once have furnished Beyoncé with a blister cushion. Hugh is of the view that the Earth is hollow, and that hidden in their corner of Vermont is a portal to a fabulous world beneath our feet, first discovered by a 19th-century pastor, Jeremiah Wilkes, while out walking his dog. Initially, Miles scoffs (“the exciting thing was that neither Kate nor Miles, in all their lives, had known this was something a person, a nonmedieval person, could believe”), but it turns out that the Wilkes legend extends beyond Hugh; has, in fact, a whole society devoted to its investigation. This is a rabbit hole of epic proportions – an entire cave-system of rabbit holes – and Miles is drawn in.
The risk with material as fantastical as this, of course, is that it collapses under the weight of its own whimsy. This is a pitfall Mason sidesteps with ease. The surface structures in Country People may be sugar-spun, but the novel’s foundations are solid, and its roots – the tangled and interconnected web of stories that gave rise to its new stories – are deliciously deep. The esoteric is counterbalanced by the mundane; family life is judged as worthy of investigation as underground caverns; and the whole thing is delivered in prose so witty and gorgeous that it calls to mind Nabokov’s comic masterpiece Pnin, surely another of the book’s literary antecedents. This is, put simply, a joyful book – and the deeper you dig, the more joyful it becomes.
• Country People by Daniel Mason is published by John Murray (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
