Daniel Mason (1) (1976–)

Unusually structured in an intriguing way. Focuses on a particular yellow house in rural wooded Massachusetts and tells the connected of its various inhabitants over 4-5 centuries. The house bears witness to the history within its walls and on its property. Not all its inhabitants lead happy lives--some meet violent ends. But, they all leave something of themselves behind literally or figuratively. Contains an element of the supernatural, but not distractingly so--it serves the story well.

Particularly interesting as it is suggestive of couple of themes:

1) a ghostly presence of history survives
2) in death there can be a regeneration of life

Recommended -- will probably be one of my top 10 reads this year...and it's been a good reading year so far.… (more)

I read widely enough to appreciate the fact that truly original, gifted storytelling is a rare and precious thing. Daniel Mason’s North Woods is the first book in a while to join the rarified pantheon of books that surprised and delighted me.

The novelty of the storytelling makes it hard to communicate the magic of the novel in the form of a summary or book review. At the most basic level, I suppose you’d characterize this the chronological tale of a single plot of land in the remote north woods of New England, a place that alternatively serves as a refuge, home, and/or prison to a succession of organisms - human, animal, vegetable – that occupy the land over the course of generations. Mason doesn’t confine himself to narration but expands his storytelling toolkit to include everything from photographs to sonnets, vintage almanac pages to snippets of birdsong, letters, botanical drawings, journals, topographical maps - even excerpts from a tantalizingly trashy tabloid.

But in Mason’s world, time isn’t a river that travels in one direction; rather, it’s a geologic accretion, events piling up one atop the other, each stratigraphic layer impacting the shape of the layer above, with tectonic events occasionally collapsing the layers into each other. Relics abandoned by previous owners resurface, altering the paths of the lives of those who come after. Lives, loves, and secrets carve metaphorical initials in the walls of the house that appears, expands, transforms, and decays as the generations pass. Ghosts of the past – some figurative, others literal – linger and interact with the present.

Each stratigraphic layer/mini-narrative possesses its own unique protagonist, plot, and sense of period. Some of the narratives are hopeful, some comic, some tragic, some poignant. What they share in common are depths of imagination, precision, and compassion, all couched in prose that is vivid and lyrical. The members of my book club each took a stab at identifying their favorite “geological layer” – what does it say that no two of us agreed on the same one?

Mason's use of nature as a metaphor for a multitude of human experiences (hope, beauty, loneliness, exile, inspiration, refuge, madness …) is artful without feeling contrived, and sets the stage for the novel’s overarching theme, which seems to be “The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.” A fitting motif for this tale that explores the fragility of human aspiration and the unfathomable mysteries of the universe, but also celebrates the ultimate transcendency of life.… (more)