Country People Review: Mason's Joyful Vermont Novel
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- Daniel Mason publishes "Country People," his follow-up to the acclaimed 2023 novel "North Woods," shifting the setting from Massachusetts to Vermont and the lens from history to literature and storytelling.
- The novel follows Miles Krzelewski, a 45-year-old husband and father of Wesley and Olive, who moves from California to Vermont with his Milton-scholar wife Kate and truffle-hunting Italian dog Giuseppe after she lands a visiting professorship.
- Miles's PhD on Russian folktales is now 12 years overdue, and his self-described tendency to dive down "rabbit holes" pulls him into a circle of Vermont eccentrics, including "the Rat Man of Vermont," a biochemist turned orchardist, and a scooter-riding snowflake photographer.
- Trekking guide Hugh introduces Miles to the legend of 19th-century pastor Jeremiah Wilkes, who reportedly discovered a portal to a hollow-Earth world beneath their corner of Vermont — a story with an entire local society devoted to investigating it.
- The reviewer's comparison to Nabokov's "Pnin" anchors the praise: "surface structures" may be "sugar-spun," the review writes, but the novel's literary foundations — drawn from myths, Milton, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy — are "deliciously deep."
Why it matters: For readers who loved "North Woods," "Country People" trades centuries-spanning American polyphony for a single year in one family, swapping historical sweep for literary excavation and local legend — a quieter, more intimate follow-up whose success rests on whether the Vermont rabbit hole feels as rich as the Massachusetts house did.
