“North Woods” is a hodgepodge narrative, brazenly disjointed in time, perspective and form. Letters, poems and song lyrics, diary entries, medical case notes, real-estate listings, vintage botanical illustrations, pages of an almanac, modern-day nature photographs, a true- …more crime detective story, an address to a historical society: Mason stuffs all this (and more!) into his bulging scrapbook of a novel. That “North Woods” proves captivating despite its piecemeal structure is testament to Mason’s powers as a writer, his stylish and supple narrative voice.

The novel lives in its oddments, arrayed for us by an author-collector well versed in pre-modern fruit farming, folk medicine and popular songs through the ages. And language. Mason sprinkles early chapters with archaic words (“higgler,” “pippin,” “paradiddles,” “flams”), and his ear for antique idioms is pitch-perfect. Osgood recalls the rowdy crew he assembled to help him clear land, decrying their “drunkenness and villainy” and lamenting that “no iron fist could stay such ruffians forever.” A few chapters (and half a century) later, a traveling Boston gentleman observes, about New England country homes, that “out here, no one tears down — one just adds upon, agglutinates, house to house, shed to shed, like some monstrous German noun.” By the time the 2020s roll around, at novel’s end, we have received an edifying tour of the history of American speechways.
Grandiose plans, vehement loves, crass betrayals and shocking transgressions play out in this house. In one of the most affecting segments, the property falls in the 1830s to a landscape painter, William Henry Teale, whose letters to his friend, a renowned writer, hint at an affection that exceeds the bounds of acceptability, and point toward a crushing regret.

Mason hits notes of comedy as well. When a local medical practitioner ministers to the young Osgood, prescribing the inhaling of rancid sheep milk to cure his apple mania (Mason, himself a trained physician, knows the history of quackery), the boy observes that “it is not mad to think of fruit.” To which his brother responds: “Sniff, man.”

Across nearly 400 pages we get involved in each of these lives, then move on; the only abiding players in this drama of ineluctable transformation are Nature and Time. Mason maintains a naturalist’s focus on flora and fauna, on the dissolution of bodies and on biological processes as seasons yield to years and to centuries. In one whimsical passage, the erotic entanglement of a vacationing couple before a cabin fireplace in 1956 is juxtaposed with the “sex romps” of two scolytid beetles, described in hilarious detail — “What perfume! Threo-4-methyl-3-heptanol! Alpha-multistriatin!” Their larvae are lodged in the bark of the firewood that the couple bring with them, carrying a malignant spore that in time will kill all the chestnut trees around the yellow house.

From this profusion Mason draws narrative intricacies I can only nod at here. A Bible belonging to a Black family in Canada, a letter written by an anonymous Native American captive, a box of home movies, old bones surfacing in the mud of spring. Documents, artifacts and stories recur across centuries, creating dramatic ironies and invoking ghosts both metaphorical and literal. How to describe Mason’s sui generis fiction? Think of E.L. Doctorow crossed with Wendell Berry, then graced with a Nabokovian predilection for pattern, puzzle and echo. (less)