Review of North Woods

 North Woods

Author: Daniel Mason

Publisher: Random House

Date of Publication: September 2023

North Woods is an amalgamation of beautiful longing, displaced love, familial friction, and the forced alienation of the past from the present. It is a lovely literary lament that blurs and intermingles the vitality of the living and the dead. Old American ballads tell ghost tales between chapters. Each character is both elevated and humbled. Farmland is wild, then tamed, then rewilded, then retamed, until old beams are tangled with tree roots, until the separation between what is and what was and what will be becomes tenuous and ephemeral. 

An escape into virgin woods. A rough cabin becomes a home. A refuge for a soldier, an anchor for a lovesick mother, a winter shelter for a cat thought to be long gone. The cabin’s orchard, a source of delicious success and bitter agony, of blossoming enlightenment and brutal loss. As the home expands and crumbles, as the area around it endures its own alterations, the past woven into the story of the home pushes to the surface. The land and the home it harbors beg to divulge their secrets, whether or not the human inhabitants want to listen.

Tension drives much of this story. It exists between the inhabitants of the home—between the residents enthralled with the land and the residents that begrudgingly endure its trials. It exists between the wilderness beyond the house that sustains the spirit and the tamed land that sustains the body. It exists between the past held in dirt and bark and apple seeds and the present that tries to smother and forget it all. The tension drives the story because the tension is the story. The house is a perfect focal point because of the tension inherent in construction of an immovable dwelling—the attempt to integrate into a landscape by changing it. It is too artificially solid to adapt to the land and too fragile to permanently join with the land, much like the people that come to occupy the house. The more that its inhabitants struggle, and the more that the land around it suffers, the more life the house resides in those who have already passed through it. Loss feeds the supernatural presence in the story. Ghosts that are both victims and perpetrators of loss adhere to the place that sustained them and the human love they wanted, had, and lost. The evolution of the land is entirely entangled with the longing, ecstasy, selfishness, and grief of human relationships. In all this confusion, there arises a sense of purposelessness. Maybe there is meant to be a derived message: change is always burdened with loss; land is ceaselessly burdened by stories; every action has an aftermath. Maybe readers are just meant to deeply feel a cascading kaleidoscope of loss, pinned at its center by this place in the North Woods, and learn from it. 

The intertwining of timelines and characters feels remarkably natural in this book. What begins as the narrative of one person turns into the narrative of three, then five, then a host of animals, and so forth. Each tale is slotted into the next as folklore with concrete evidence and impact. No thread overwhelms another, yet each retains a tangible presence. It is a lovely way to make clear how the past informs the present. The last chapter is thus tasked with neatly tying off a pattern of growth. The character chosen to be the vessel of this finality is unsure of herself and burdened with various personal problems. She lacks a bond with the physical home that grounds the book. Her purposelessness diverges from the tenacious ghosts with whom she shares the North Woods, and prevents her from having a concentrated impact on either the landscape around her or the reader beyond her. All these factors make her story feel like an unraveling and an attenuation rather than a natural point of finality. The downturn of this ending does have one positive: it indicates the quality of the rest of the book.

North Woods is an exercise in imagination. The integration of fables, fiction, various time periods, and an old house pinning it all together may not be for every reader. It is dispirited and hopeful, curious and lamenting. It is for readers with an unnamed, unclear longing for a piece of the world and a piece of the past they will never experience.