North Woods

This was a good book. I don’t say that often enough. And because of that I feel like a bad consumer of literature. I mean, I used to enjoy reading. I did it a lot. As the years have progressed, though, I’ve sloughed off that part of my brain. Mostly because my eyes immediately become heavy as soon as print is placed in front of my face. My commute has become almost exclusively podcasts or music because they don’t require concentration or retention. It’s a cop out, I know, but just the thought of the expenditure of brain power makes me sleepy. And the further thought of reading something challenging is even more exhausting. Thus my lean into crime fiction and more genre fiction that seem less challenging. But also the rise in my general dissatisfaction with my reading experiences.

So, I made a conscientious choice to go for it and read North Woods. what with its gold seal on the front and everything, it made it seem like it had to be a “serious” book. To some extent it is a serious book, but not really. Because it’s an incredibly well written book that is also incredibly readable. Which I supposed doesn’t preclude it from being serious, but it’s not the brain-exploding slog one might associate with a high-minded, dense tome. Granted, it’s not a straight-forward narrative in the traditional sense. It’s more of a series of stories — ghost stories, truth be told — that all roll into one another, building and collapsing over several hundred years. I’m not sure, honestly, what makes something literary fiction, but I feel like this is it. Mixing genres and styles, it is one part historical fiction, one part travelogue, one part small-town tale and another part a supernatural, almost Stephen King like thing. But written with a detail and a particular focus on the natural world that I’ve rarely seen. The house that we see over the generations is in the woods of Massachusetts. And in those woods are trees. And bugs. And animals and fungi and rotting things and falling things. Weather and decay. In fact, the whole story is bathed in it. I think Mason may have been an entomologist or an arborist in a former life.

Along with the great writing and an inventive story, Mason uses a bunch of different narrative techniques, from straight prose to letters to journals to spin this oldey-timey yarn. The mixed media — for lack of a better term — was both a blessing and curse. Well, not a curse, really, but a distraction. It’s certainly not the first novel I’ve read to do this, but while it does help break up the narrative a bit and not make it seem as monolithic as it might otherwise be, it tended to diminish his literary voice a little bit in places where I was craving more of his omnipotent narrator. Though this methodology does allow for the overlapping waves of time that is critical to show the evolution of this plot of land in the woods. It solves mysteries from an earlier time. It fills in holes and informs our more modern dwellers of the land’s past and cautions in a lot of ways that nature and ghosts will always win out. Ultimately, the varied story, great prose and beautiful spookiness hooked me, and despite me not having the vocabulary to praise it appropriately, it’s a very cool book.