North Woods, by Daniel Mason

(2023, Random House)

In his wonderfully titled poem “A Postcard from the Volcano” Wallace Stevens wrote,

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill…

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what is still
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw

This is a major theme of Daniel Mason’s novel, North Woods. What remains of us in the places we loved or in the lives of those who live after us? Must everything that flourishes, decay?

The novel is the story of a property in the forests of northern Massachusetts, where a number of very different people live over the years between the earliest Puritan settlements and our present century. It begins with a couple escaping from a repressive, paternalistic regime in a Puritan village, and ends with a modern PhD student researching trees. Each set of people is involved in dramatic and domestic incidents, some in love and some in murder. There’s a captive of Indians, a British officer, his twin daughters, an artist, a medium, the mother of an autistic son. An orchard grows from an apple in the pocket of a hastily buried soldier. The orchard flourishes and declines. The woods change. A house is built, rebuilt, and destroyed. There are ghosts.

The stories of some of the characters are told in the first person, and Mason creates very different voices or styles for each of his narrators. His third person narrative is also wonderfully written, with loving descriptions of the woods, the streams, the seasons, and with insight into a wide variety of states of mind. Mason has won many awards, and this book attests to his powers. It is available in the Bellingham Public Library and at Village Books.