Why this book: I saw a review of it on-line and it looked interesting.  I talked my literature book club into selecting it for our September 2024 session. 

Summary in 3 Sentences: It is a series of short stories taking place chronologically in and around a house in the Northwoods of Western Massachusetts.  The stories seem loosely connected, beginning with the original construction of the house by a couple escaping from the sever puritan society in Springfield Mass in the 1600s, and continuing through the ensuing four centuries to present day – each story somehow related to the house and/or the property it is on and the characters who lived there.  The final chapters/stories serve to tie the previous stories together. 

My Impressions: Very interesting book – different and I liked it. Not everyone will.  It reads like a series of short stories – and the connection between the stories isn’t always clear – but it’s there. And the message is VERY big picture.  And profound.  But to get that insight, takes patience.  As I read the book, each individual story was interesting,  but I wondered, WTF is this book about?  The good news is that I found the individual stories each compelling in their own way, though I – like I suspect most readers – wondered where they were going, and what they had to do with each other.  In the end, it all came together in what I thought was a very profound way.  

The cover endorsement calls this book “a monumental achievement of polyphony.”  I looked up “polyphony” and it is indeed an appropriate description. Polyphony: “in music simultaneously combining a number of parts, each forming an individual melody and harmonizing with each other.” The individual melodies would be each of the chapters/stories in the book – each a short story unto itself – the harmony only starts becoming evident toward the end of the book.  In the final two chapters – the light came on for me. Each of the stories connects in some way to the old house deep in the woods of western Massachusetts and the generations of people who either lived there, or were somehow associated with it, and how the house played a key, but sometimes subtle role in their lives. 

Additionally, I was surprised several times to turn the page and find a poem – written by a character in the story that I’d just read, reflecting a somewhat different perspective on their story.  A bit disconcerting, but deciding to roll with it, I found the poems interesting, valuable and worth reading. 

The individual stories start in the 1600s and progress chronologically into the 21s century…..and beyond. Stories of:

• a young couple eloping from Springfield Mass in the mid 1600s. They build the initial hut;
• a woman abducted by Natives who then risks all to protect them;
• a man passionate about apples, builds out the house, creates an apple orchard, fights in the Revolutionary War for the English;
• two sisters (daughters of the apple man) who live in the house together with a co-pendent and toxic relationship;
• the life of a weevil that decimated the woods;
• two married men who have a forbidden but intense love for each other;
• a charlatan seance medium who claims to connect with the dead;
• a man on a contract to pursue, find, and return an escaped slave;
• an amateur history buff looking for clues to validate a theory about the area;
• A mother with a schizophrenic son who is desperately trying to help him;
• the psychiatrist of that son who is struggling to understand the boy… and the boy’s mother;
• the daughter of the mother, and sister of the schizophrenic son,  who has to go through the effects of her dead mother, and dispose of her property;
• a small town police officer who tries to unravel a very strange murder near the house;
• A woman botanist doing research on spring ephemerals in the area around the house

All these varied stories are tied together, loosely or more intimately to each other and to the house that the original elopers built after fleeing early Puritan-era Springfield, Mass. At different times over the years,  the house is expanded, abandoned, renewed – it seems to have its own character.  And all the stories are tied in one way or another to the “northwoods” that surround the house, and which passively look on as the various dramas unfold over four centuries.

In the process of learning about the lives of the people in these short stories, we learn about the forests of New England, their beauty and vulnerability – to man, the Dutch Elm Disease and the Chestnut blight. A person who loves nature will find much to appreciate in this book – the house is near a small town, but out on the edge of the primeval forests.  The cover of the book has a cougar on it – referred to as a “catamount” – an old word for a cougar. The catamount plays a subtle role in several of the stories – and seems to represent a threat, a subtle darkness or impending ruination that  runs through many of the stories.  But also the catamount is now extinct in New England – as a result of a variety of forces that make up the stories in this book. 

There is also some “magical realism” in this book – some things that happen that surprised me and let me know that the normal rules of life and physics may not apply in the reality this book describes.

Themes that I detected: 

• There is lots of drama in the small picture – the lives of the people in the stories in the book.  Not so much drama in the big picture, represented by the Northwoods themselves.
• Nature and the woods have a different draw to different people for very different reasons.  The characters in the stories had very different relationships to the woods that surrounded the house. 
• Contrast between the ephemeral (the drama in each of the stories) and the long view – the passage of time, change, and evolution over centuries
• Life and death – are ever-present, but are they truly what they seem?

Northwoods was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a reason.  Here are two very positive reviews that I read after I’d read the book, and after I’d written most of this review. If you’re interested, these reviewers are much more articulate than I in their praise of the book.  Like I said, it is not a book for someone looking for a classic page-turner, beginning-to-end story.  But definitely interesting, thought provoking, and different.  

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/19/1200166912/book-review-daniel-mason-north-woods

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/09/13/daniel-mason-north-woods-book-review/