A young couple cavorts through forest and meadow as spring erupts around them. Each has escaped England, and then together eloped from the Bay Colony, beyond barely civilized Springfield. So this must be mid-seventeenth century, in the Berkshires of Massacheusetts. At the end of this introductory tale, the man plants a stone, saying, “Here.”
Thus begins North Woods, a novel by Stanford psychiatrist Daniel Mason. That stone becomes a house, which accretes additions and occupants over the following four hundred years. The story is told in strict chronological order, but that is the only constraint Mason places on his craft. A first-person account of the woman’s abduction by Indians, scrawled in the margins of a family bible is followed by two pages of transition narrative, only to revert to a prolonged mini-memoir by Charles Osgood, who builds an apple empire and spawns twin daughters, Mary and Alice.
Their story, one of love and betrayal, is told in traditional third-person, albeit using words and phrasing which might have been common during their lives. They engage not only in maintaining and expanding the house and orchard, but also making music, playing and singing their own compositions. Beginning at the one-third point, Mason displays his gift for verse, a multi-stanza epic about a mountain lion (“catamount”) who uses the house as an abattoir. The next chapter is a one-sentence proverb, explicated by a three-page long footnote.
And so it goes. People appear, are sketched briefly, and move on or die. New owners, new centuries, new wings on the house. A painter, seeking refuge from the commercial demands of his agent in Boston, tries to convince his wife to remain in the wooded retreat. In the process, he discovers his love for his best male friend, with whom he traveled in Europe. A writer not unlike Walt Whitman. Almost two hundred years later, a scholar of that writer inherits the house, and achingly (to the reader) fails to discover the connection.
The songs of the Osgood twins are interspersed among the stories, to comment from the past on events of the present. Their own baroque ending is a recurring theme throughout the book.
The joy lies in both style and structure. The characters have convoluted connections over time and space. Mason exposes them with care, as if seen through a filigreed curtain. He dabbles in magical realism to link the occupants of the house, one character’s presumed hallucinations seeming to arise from ghosts which haunt the land.
Each sentence is a jewel, words chosen wisely, at times sparingly, at others, with a grace which astonishes. He is skilled when describing nature, the woods around the house, the trees which rise and fall, the stream which attracts and kills.
North Woods is filled with miniatures, polished and presented not as a coherent narrative, but as individual epigrams lining the walls of the Yellow House. Rushing through this novel is not recommended. Rather, sip it a chapter (there are 25) at a siting, and return when ready for another. The house will be there, waiting.