North Woods

April 1, 2023

In hist latest, Pulitzer Prize finalist Mason takes us on a journey through time via place--a cabin in the New England woods first inhabited by two young lovers who have fled their Puritan colony. Other inhabitants include an English soldier gone AWOL and unmarried twin sisters who survive war only to pick each other apart through envy. There's even a panther and a mystified crime reporter, who can't make sense of a mass grave nearby. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 31, 2023
Mason (A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth) follows the inhabitants of a secluded western Massachusetts home and their tragedies across centuries in this spectacular ghost story. In the 1760s, the eccentric and twice-widowed Charles Osgood, who’s obsessed with finding the best apple in the world, discovers a stellar tree on abandoned land and from there starts an orchard. His two daughters, Mary and Alice, keep the orchard going but Alice’s long line of potential suitors sparks murderous rage in Mary, who doesn’t get the same attention as her sister. The letters of the next owner, hyper-naturalistic landscape painter William Henry Teale, recount his expansion of the house and his slowly confessed, eventually consummated but doomed love for his friend Erasmus Nash. Circa 1920, the ghosts of Teale and Nash torment Emily Farnsworth, until her button magnate husband invites charlatan medium Anastasia Rossi to the house, and her seance unexpectedly conjures real spirits. The Farnsworths’ daughter, Lillian, struggles later with her schizophrenic son, Robert. In her later years, she joins a prison pen pal program and narrowly escapes a grisly fate. As time passes, others are drawn to the house for personal reasons that all end in tragedy. Throughout, Mason interleaves his crystalline prose with enchanting and authentic-seeming historical documents, including a Native American captivity narrative, psychiatrist case notes, and pulpy true crime reportage. Each arc is beautifully, heartbreakingly conveyed, stitching together subtle connections across time. This astonishes. Agent: Christy Fletcher, Fletcher and Co.

Starred review from July 15, 2023
The story of a house, the humans who inhabit it, the ghosts who haunt it, and the New England forest encompassing them all. In the opening chapter of the fourth novel by Mason--a Pulitzer Prize finalist for A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020)--a pair of rebellious young lovers flee their Puritan Massachusetts village to seek refuge in the "north woods": "They were Nature's wards now, he told her, they had crossed into a Realm." Readers, too, will find themselves in an entrancing fictional realm where the human, natural, and supernatural mingle, all captured in the author's effortlessly virtuosic prose. Across the centuries, the cabin built by those lovers will transform and house a host of characters, among them Charles Osgood, a British colonist who establishes an apple orchard there; Osgood's twin daughters, Alice and Mary, whose mutual spinsterhood conceals a bitter jealousy; and Karl Farnsworth, an avid hunter who sees the land as a "sportsman's paradise" in which to open a private lodge (he hopes to host Teddy Roosevelt despite the "vile" sounds his distraught wife hears in the old structure). Many chapters read like found historical documents, including one side of the correspondence between painter William Henry Teale and his friend Erasmus Nash, a poet, whose visit to the north woods house will have an unexpected impact on both their lives--and those of future inhabitants. Elsewhere we find "Case Notes on Robert S.," in which a psychiatrist pays a house call to a resident suffering from possible schizophrenia and given to auditory hallucinations while wandering the forest; and "Murder Most Cold," a dispatch by TRUE CRIME! columnist Jack Dunne, summoned from New York to look into a gory death on the property. Throughout, this loose and limber novel explores themes of illicit desire, madness, the occult, the palimpsest of human history, and the inexorable workings of the natural world (a passage recounting the fateful mating of an elm bark beetle is unforgettable), all handled with a touch that is light and sure. Like the house at its center, a book that is multitudinous and magical.

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Starred review from July 1, 2023

This remarkable new novel from Mason (The Winter Soldier) is the story of the United States from precolonial times through the present day and beyond, from the perspective of a single house in Western Massachusetts. As the often-tragic tales of its various residents are recounted, Mason employs an array of literary styles and genres, including the Indigenous-abduction narrative, folk ballads, letters, true-crime pulp journalism, insect erotica, and contemporary speculative fiction. Beginning with young lovers running away from their Puritan community, the novel visits (among others) an obsessive apple cultivator and his eccentric twin daughters, a landscape painter whose friendship with a writer blossoms into forbidden love, a phony clairvoyant who for the first time detects real spirits, and a man with schizophrenia who is aware of the ghosts inhabiting the property. Throughout, and especially during times when the house lies vacant, the natural history of the land over time is compellingly portrayed. VERDICT Although the novel spends varying amounts of time with each successive set of characters, Mason depicts all of their stories with sympathy, sensitivity, and affectionate humor. Epic in scope and ambitious in style, this book succeeds on all counts. Highly recommended.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2023
A young couple escapes their colonial Massachusetts colony and runs for seven days before being free from pursuit. Finding fertile land, they establish a homestead, plant a garden, and start a family. That origin story and its biblical themes presage the ambitious task Mason (A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth, 2020) sets for himself as this land and home serve as a through line for centuries of occupants in this magisterial mosaic. Apples are a core symbol for Mason. When a violent attacker is felled by an axe, an apple seed takes root, "a shoot rises, thickens, seeks the bars of light above it, gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs that once guarded the dead man's meager heart." Subsequent tenants of the land include Charles Osgood, whose dream is to cultivate the perfect apple. Osgood's Wonder becomes a sought-after variety. Long after Osgood has gone to soil, his twin daughters maintain the orchard well into spinsterhood. Years later, a little-known painter finds solitude on the homestead, but his heart is asunder, hiding an illicit love until his nurse provides him with the courage to finally express his yearnings. Other inhabitants reinforce the dual nature of the human condition, simultaneously serving as minuscule collections of molecules against the inevitable march of time while also contributing to a collective, quasi-supernatural consciousness. Truly triumphant.

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