Book Report: North Woods

18. Daniel Mason, North Woods (2023) (12/27/2024)

I have barely been reading lately. Only eighteen books this year, and the last one finished, a schlocky mystery, was back in October! That must be a record. And not one I wish to break, so next year I'd like to get back to reading, make the time, even if that means stealing an hour from my evening TV-bingeing. 

This book did take me a little while, partly, perhaps, because it's a disparate hodgepodge of stories and styles, ranging in time from the Puritan days up to—and beyond—the present day, and encompassing, along with straight narrative, diary entries, a speech, ballads, clinical case notes, a True Crime! magazine article, even home movies. The one thing that stays constant is the place: a homestead in western Massachusetts. It's time alone that keeps things changing, and Mason uses the device with great skill. Even the language evolves as we progress through the centuries, and the plants and trees change, and the original yellow house itself grows in size, eventually crumbles, is reconstructed, finally burns down. It's a story of natural succession. Each part captivated me, and it was fascinating to see how earlier events reappear (often in the form of ghosts). But because it's not strictly plot-driven, it was easy for me to put it aside.

It's impossible to summarize this book. The New York Times has a review that does it more justice than I can, but I will echo its observation that what makes this book succeed so well is the way it toggles between the macro and the micro, in a way making all of it—all this life—at once glorious and trivial, celebrating the sometimes painful exhilaration of being alive while never losing sight of the cosmic indifference that underscores the natural (and human) condition.

Here's a paragraph from early on, sometime in the late 1700s, about a young woman living in what came to be known as the yellow house and a potter she takes a fancy to (though their romance is thwarted by a jealous twin sister):

She was carrying a shopping basket. Despite his crutches, he offered to hold it for her, and when she was done with her purchases, asked her if he might walk her to the edge of town. He’d been a drummer before the accident, and as they walked, he tapped out a string of paradiddles, ruffs, flams, and charge strokes. He spoke of the ways the cannonballs came hissing down the field of battle, the sergeant saved when a British cutlass was embedded in a turnip he had stolen and hidden in his hat, and how he’d seen Howe at Bunker Hill but missed his shot. He’d lost his foot when a gun belonging to a baker from Cambridge went off at half-cock during training exercises. He said that he was lucky, given his profession, that he hadn’t lost a hand. Then he told her about salt glazing. 

And by contrast, here's a paragraph describing a twenty-first-century show of works—forest landscapes—by a nineteenth-century painter (author of the diary mentioned above) who had also lived in the yellow house. The "she" here is Nora, a young botanist:

Eight rooms were mounted to show the works. Her role had been to identify the species when possible, and to provide commentary form an ecologist's perspective, alongside a discussion of Native plant use by two Mohican descendants who'd been brought there from their reservation in Wisconsin. And so she had described the way the level of lichen on the trees gave evidence of snowpack, the exactitude with which Teale had distinguished ferns that lost their leaves in winter and those that didn't, the different holes drilled by the different woodpeckers, the clustered sapling oaks that suggested a forgotten squirrel cache. But what struck her most was the vision of a forest she had previously only imagined. How extraordinary it was to look at a grove of massive beeches unblemished by beech scale, hemlock unmenaced by the adelgid, ash before the borer, elms before Dutch elm disease, chestnuts before the blight. At the end of the exhibit was a virtual-reality installation, produced in cooperation with a team from MIT, in which visitors could don headsets and step into a digital re-creation of Teale's Creek and Chestnuts. When she first placed the glasses on her head, she found herself within a world she'd known only in data tables. She'd seen many photographs of chestnut trees, but she had never stood beneath one and looked up.
     The headsets were so loud that she had to turn the volume down. But this is what it would have sounded like, the wall text told her. Between 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America. Once, the forest would have been deafening. In the recording they had layered the songs of hundreds of birds, not only those she knew, but others now displaced to distant forests—blackpoll warblers, Bicknell's thrushes—or lost forever, like the passenger pigeons whose melodies were re-created from musical notations that had been set down before they went extinct.
     And it was then, looking up at the canopy, feeling the birdsong in her spine, that it had all come crashing down.
     She felt as if she had fallen in love with someone only to learn that they were dying....

And to think, in his day job Mason is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford. He's published four other books, which I may have to seek out.

But now, what's next? Let's see if I can finish one last book before 2025 rolls in. (Or, two? For an even 20?)