COUNTRY PEOPLE, by Daniel Mason
Like Francine Prose and Muriel Spark, Daniel Mason has what the ancient Romans called nomen omen, and modern columnists “aptronym”: a self-determining name. His fiction is indeed masonry: layered, solid structures with the sticky mortar visible.
A 2021 Pulitzer finalist for his story collection “A Registry of My Passage on The Earth,” Mason is also a psychiatrist at Stanford. His novel “North Woods” was a multigenerational, multigenre-ational saga about the successive inhabitants of a house in rural Massachusetts that landed on many Best of 2023 lists, including The New York Times’s.
His new novel, “Country People,” is more modest and manageable, a prescription for summer amusement that takes immediate effect. It’s a road-trip book that morphs into a campus novel — or more accurately, an off-campus novel — interspersed with historical-seeming quotations, fantastical illustrations and a final, very long footnote that features another aptronym, Yvette the Vet. It is lovely if occasionally confounding company, like going in and out of a thick mist.
Perhaps this foggy feeling is over-identification with the novel’s very sympathetic main character, Miles Krzelewski. About to turn 45, Miles will be traveling miles, from the Bay Area of California, where he’s been struggling with his dissertation for 14 years, to the mountains of the made-up town called Greenbury, Vt., where his more successful wife, Kate Petrosian, has been offered a visiting professorship at a prestigious college. Unlike other teachers, she refuses to pander to softening academic standards with courses like “‘Look What You Made Me Do’: Fyodor (Dostoyevsky) and Taylor (Swift).” Hers are called simply, sternly “Milton” or “Blake.”
On the trip the couple are joined by their children, 12-year-old Wesley and 9-year-old Olive, whose classmates have names like Fanny or Job. “It was a trend, this naming of children with names that needed explanations, and then getting angry when asked to explain it,” is one of “Country People”’s incisive asides. Also in the car is Giuseppe, a Lagotto Romagnolo acquired during the pandemic (and why this type of dog has not eclipsed the ubiquitous Goldendoodle is a mystery, as a quick Google reveals it looks like Will Ferrell and is bred to hunt truffles). In this strange new mushroomy fairyland of the Northeast, these small charges are all prone to going missing.
And what is the topic of Miles’s dissertation? What isn’t? “He’d begun with an obscure troubadour, taken three years to learn that he was obscure for a reason, switched to Rabelais without telling his adviser, then the body in Rabelais, then monsters in Rabelais, then monsters in French folk tales, each great fun, but none of which led anywhere concrete.” His first adviser dies; his second drifts away. “Well, perhaps Western Europe was the problem!” Miles decided, drifting to Chekhov, trains, Tolstoy, and then Russian folk tale peasantry. Prone to the modern metaphorical rabbit hole, maybe he will benefit from proximity to some old-fashioned real ones.
While the prose of “Country People,” flows like a babbling brook, its depiction of the agony and bliss of procrastination is the world-class work of someone who must know. Samuel Coleridge’s Person from Porlock, who supposedly interrupted the poet when he was composing “Kubla Khan,” is a familiar Krzelewski-Petrosian family villain. “Should he switch topics again?” wonders Miles, newly obsessed with scything once settled in Greenbury despite initial prickles of sciatica. “In any case, the scything was too tiring to leave any time for writing.” To defer is human.
Having settled in a charming if mice-infested home borrowed from Norbert Rumphius, an economics professor, the family proceeds to encounter an array of zany and sometimes cartoonish local characters. Kate, in remission from multiple sclerosis and endlessly patient with her husband’s stagnation, might be understandably tempted by Bjorn, a Spandexed Norwegian ski instructor and former paratrooper who competed at the Sochi Olympics. Miles finds himself playing footsie with Nausicaä, a drama teacher who creatively authorizes a pride of Pucks, so as not to disappoint any child actors, in their school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
More transformatively, he is invited to attend a meeting of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society, dedicated to a man who claimed to have discovered a glorious underground world, the ultimate rabbit hole, of precisely the sort depicted in Russian folk tales. Some of the kooks in this group, like a homesteading blogger whose brand is amplified once her husband fails at farming and leaves her, are perfectly absurd. (“And Miles found Farm Candy videos helped pass the hours; he learned to milk a goat, remove a hairball from the sink with chopsticks, sharpen a chainsaw, make a bra (episodes 1, 2, and 3), bake muffins, cook samosas and hang gutters while balanced on a very high ladder in shorts no bigger than a tool belt.”)
Others, like a scooter-riding photographer nicknamed after the real-life snowflake authority Wilson Bentley, and the knee-slapping hosts of radio programs that advise on gardens and antiques, outstay their welcome. But if these Hollow Earthers exist merely to impart something profound or practical that will ground our drifting scholar, so be it. There’s so much fine, freewheeling observation and pillowy erudition here, it’s tempting just to sink in.
COUNTRY PEOPLE | By Daniel Mason | Random House | 320 pp. | $30
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