Review: "North Woods," Daniel Mason

By Paul Carrier

It’s a novel idea for a novel. And it works, magnificently.

Set the tale somewhere in the backwoods of western Massachusetts, where a couple of 17th-century lovebirds who have fled from their Puritan families build a cabin. Then, explore what happens at that abode over the next 300-plus years as residents come and go, only to reappear many years later, in some cases, as spirits.

That’s the framework around which author Daniel Mason builds North Woods, which has been described by both The New York Times and The Washington Post as one of the 10 best books of 2023.

Mason, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a 2022 collection of short stories, pulls off this marvel with such panache that North Woods is positively mesmerizing, in part because of the clever way in which it is constructed. The author describes his characters and their lives in telling detail, yet he also pulls back from that tight focus to connect dots that span decades, even centuries.

The woman who escaped her Puritan settlement with her lover eventually finds herself living alone in their cabin. As she ages, a much younger woman captured by Indians is brought to her home to live, with deadly consequences.

In time, a veteran of the French and Indian War acquires the property. Moving in with his two daughters, he establishes a successful apple orchard, which the daughters continue to operate for a time following their father’s death fighting as a Loyalist during the American Revolution. The daughters, Alice and Mary Osgood, eventually fall out, with devastating repercussions.

And so it goes. The decades and the centuries fly by as the cabin’s inhabitants hold, then relinquish, center stage. Through it all, the cabin lives on, eventually as an ancillary building attached to a larger, newer, constantly evolving homestead.

There is madness here, as well as obsession, murder, adultery and goings-on that are sometimes ghastly, sometimes ghostly, sometimes both. New occupants and visitors arrive at periodic intervals — a closeted gay painter, an escaped slave, a bombastic factory owner, a medium, a troubled mother and her deranged son, a retired CPA turned amateur historian.

The personal stories of the ever-changing cast of characters are detailed and compelling, but it is the links that emerge between distant generations that linger in the reader’s mind.

 

In addition to exploring the eerie interconnectedness of people from different time periods, North Woods examines the long, mutable history of a venerable home and the forms that human life may take — at least in fiction — in both this world and the next.

North Woods is a remarkable achievement, thanks to Mason’s vivid imagination, impish humor, inventive plotting and the varied nature of his characters. The novel's sumptuous descriptions of the natural world resonate, but the masterstroke is the threads, impervious to time, that bind so many of the unsuspecting mortals who set foot in a cabin somewhere in western Massachusetts.