Review of Country People by Daniel Mason

Mason plays with the tone of his newest literary fiction, offering vast rural expanses, claustrophobic woods, childlike wonder, growing paranoia, sudden danger, haunting beasts, and the comfort of everyday familial patterns as a backdrop to characters' struggles to grow, adapt, and, in some cases, reimagine their paths.

The world trembled in his nostrils. Some of this was new, and some familiar. Closing his eyes, he took it in, all in, and then he pricked his ears and stared in the darkness.

Something extraordinary was in the air.

Daniel Mason's newest novel, Country People, tracks a year of a family's life as they strike out for a rural existence and leave many of the comforts of the urban wprld behind.

Patriarch Mike is a dreamer and a romantic--over a decade late achieving his Russian folklore PhD, and increasingly worried that he is a disappointment to everyone. When his wife Kate is offered a visiting professorship at a university in Vermont, their family treks from California and traipses into a town with a colorful cast of characters, legends and stories, and woods that seem magical--making a life unlike anything they've experienced before.

To have no sense of what lay beneath him: the caves, the pith, the plunge. He looked down at the floor. And imagined, far below, within his earthy barracks, another person looking up. Giuseppe rose from his bed and ambled over.

And you? thought Miles. Was that what you've been telling us?

Mason plays with the tone of the book, meandering between pastoral, peaceful settings, what seems to be magical realism with dark undertones, Mike's growing paranoia, and reassuring familial comforts.

The scything and ties to Russian peasant life were fantastic, as was the years-long evolution of Mike's dissertation topic, inspired by his ongoing curiosity about the world and his insatiable interest in the Next Thing.

As Mike questions his own worth and path, I worried along with him that his marriage might be crumbling, but Mason ultimately draws together the threads of doubt and fear about that relationship into a satisfying resolution. Meanwhile, various levels of disaster and darkness exist alongside the widespread, convoluted, intriguing, outlandish hopes of many within the community that a magical world might be accessible to them. Once the facts in both matters are straight, the novel leads to a heartwarming conclusion in which certain fates are accepted and other shifts in life are achieved. Characters' reimagined futures feel all the more powerful after the struggles within the book.

I loved that Giuseppe the dog is given so much page time and importance here.

I'm in for all the Daniel Mason books, always.

I read a prepublication edition of this title courtesy of NetGalley and Random House.

More from Daniel Mason

Daniel Mason is also the author of other wonderful books like The Winter Soldier, North Woods, and The Piano Tuner.