“Country People,” Daniel Mason’s novel set in contemporary times, will come as something of a surprise for fans of his historical fiction – including, most recently, his masterful “North Woods.”
But achievements like “North Woods” – which offered a fresh view of American history reflected in the lives of the successive inhabitants of a house in Massachusetts over the past four centuries – do not come along every day. With “Country People,” Mason has opted for something lighter, a romp that unfolds over a single academic year and playfully explores the power of storytelling, family, and community.
“Country People” involves a couple of urban academics who move from northern California to rural Vermont with their two school-age children and dog when the wife accepts a prestigious one-year visiting professorship in the English department of a local college. Kate Petrosian fervently believes that liberal arts in general and John Milton and William Blake in particular have much wisdom to offer students – even in an era when the university “had abandoned itself so completely to the promises of technology that her students studying biology (and not, say, bioengineering) were considered crazy, wasteful hippies.” Kate’s hope is that, away from his obligations as a teaching assistant, her husband, Miles Krzelewski, will finally finish his dissertation on Russian folklore, which is 14 years overdue because he keeps changing topics.
Why We Wrote This
With the novel “Country People,” Daniel Mason opts for something lighter than his historical fiction – a romp that unfolds over a single academic year and playfully explores the power of storytelling, family, and community.
But Greensbury, Vermont, is a lushly forested “childcare desert” rich in diversions. Instead of working on his doctorate, the eminently distractible Miles becomes the primary caregiver for his children and enthusiastically embraces the local culture. Despite his lack of experience, he volunteers as a parent coach in the Greensbury Valley children’s cross-country ski league, taught by a Norwegian Olympic medalist who flaunts his muscles in red spandex from Sochi. Miles also signs up to assist in the annual elementary school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The show’s flirtatious young director, fresh from a stint as summer musical director at Camp Samuel Beckett, channels “a medieval tavern wench at an Aerosmith concert” in her orange velvet breeches, fishnet stockings, and Red Sox bomber jacket.
Miles eventually gets pulled into the local chapter of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society, whose mission is to investigate its 19th-century namesake’s contention that there is a hidden entrance to a spectacular underworld nearby. (Passages from Wylkes’ invented “Colloquies” are sprinkled throughout the novel.) The Society members’ earnest reports on the unverifiable provenance of this document bring to mind the hilarious amateur historical society in “North Woods.”
Miles, who notes that Russian folktales frequently feature underground kingdoms, feels in his element, “however nonsensical, illogical, indeed structurally impossible a hollow Earth was.” He is self-aware enough to recognize that when it comes to going down rabbit holes, he’s an expert.
The Wylkes Society’s members include many of the amiable oddballs Miles has met around town. These include the ski instructor, the celebrity-obsessed leader of seasonal nature rambles, his daughter’s third grade teacher, and a friendly man who uses a wheelchair and whose conversation helps pass the time during a wait at the local urgent care center after a skiing injury. (The man describes his great project, dubbed the “Encyclopedia of Foolish Errors, Registry of Unsubstantiated Nonsense, and Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”) Also in attendance at the meetings is Andrei Abramov, a biochemist postdoc who, like Miles, followed his wife to the college and has become a “marooned academic.” Andrei has taken up farming, and Miles eagerly joins him, hoping that the backbreaking work of scything will enhance his understanding of the Russian peasants he’s supposed to be writing about.
“Country People” is framed as a sort of fairytale – Miles’ non-dissertation – about a floundering man who eventually finds his way out of the woods. Its unnamed narrator periodically interjects wry commentary into his account of Miles’ misadventures in the land of snow and sap: “Reader, how I want to tell you that Cave A-76 turned out to be the long-fabled entrance to the underworld,” he remarks at one point.
Mason has a field day riffing on the absurdities of contemporary academic culture and flagging the divides that separate what are often called coastal elites at the western and eastern edges of the country. The Krzelewski-Petrosians are a family whose daughter’s stuffies are named Freudenschade and Hegemony. They speak in literary references, feast on local produce, and are astonished by the alien foodstuffs they encounter at the local convenience store, such as hazelnut cranberry-flavored Coffee Drink. There’s a recurring gag about a prolific sociologist’s propensity for turning every aspect of Greensbury life into a published paper.
Mason is a psychiatrist and associate professor in Stanford University’s Department of Psychiatry as well as a writer. His interest in the interplay between literature, history, and medical practice informs his fiction. In “Country People,” he highlights – with levity and humor – how erroneous ideas, gullibility, and blinders can lead even people who should know better down rabbit holes, and what it takes to tunnel one’s way out.