Read This: ‘North Woods’ by Daniel Mason

I’m going a little bit out on a limb today, content-wise, and I hope you’ll indulge me. I’ve been sort of out of commission for the past week — first with beloved out-of-town guests to show around, then with a horrible head cold from being buffeted by a frigid late-winter wind with insufficient head and neck protection for those tour-guide days. (It’s now a freakish 82º out there.) I’ve spent the sick days curled up with a book so good I’m almost happy for the excuse to have disappeared into it! It’s North Woods by Daniel Mason — a novel, not a gardening book. But if you enjoy this blog, if you’re a person who loves to be immersed in plants and forests and orchards, even (or especially) when reading fiction, then you might love this book as much as I do. And how much do I love it? If I were forced to list my all-time top 10 novels, this would easily make the list. It’s magnificent, and not just because of the plant life.

Form-wise, it’s sort of a cross between A.S. Byatt (esp. Possession, The Biographer’s Tale) and Richard Powers (esp. The Overstory), rolled up with historical fiction and ghost stories, and lots more — while being entirely original, and much more than the sum of those parts. The narrative takes place over the course of three centuries, all of it emanating from a single (ever-morphing) house deep in the woods of Western Massachusetts. It’s told in a dazzling array of forms: memoir, lyrics, letters, a draft lecture, a real estate listing, notes from a medical file ... I could go on. The woods are very much alive in Mason’s hands, while no artifact or occupant here is ever quite dead and gone. I haven’t read Mason before, but either he’s a consummate plantsman or has a supernatural talent for absorbing and synthesizing research material. By which I mean, the man can really write about nature. And just generally speaking, wow, the man can write.

It’s one of the more unsummarizable novels I’ve ever read — it’s an experience you just have to have for yourself. And I don’t want to risk giving anything away. But I will add that it also offers the reader a chance to play detective, following clues and making connections all along the way. I went to read the NYT review after finishing it, and some of those connections seem to have been lost on the reviewer, which makes me wonder how many more there might be that I missed myself. 

Which is great, because I will absolutely be heading back into these woods at some point, and look forward to finding whatever I might have missed on my first visit.

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