Some novels talk to you quietly at first, the way a good neighbor does over a fence, and then, before you have noticed, have walked you all the way into the woods. That is the trick Country People by Daniel Mason pulls off. It opens with a family crossing the country in a station wagon and closes somewhere stranger and more moving than you expect from a book that spends so much of its time making you laugh.
The Setup: A Silicon Valley Family Meets the Vermont Woods
Miles Krzelewski is forty-five, fourteen years into a dissertation on Russian folktales that keeps changing its own subject, and quietly certain he has become the family disappointment. His wife, Kate, is a Milton and Blake scholar with tenure, a gift for making students cry in the good way, and a history of multiple sclerosis that hovers at the edge of every tender scene. When Kate lands a one-year visiting professorship at a small Vermont college, the couple loads up their two children (skeptical, conspiracy-curious Wesley and joyful, name-mangling Olive) and their truffle-hound Giuseppe, and drives east into a place they have romanticized without understanding at all.
What follows is less a plot than a slow, glorious settling-in. Miles becomes the default parent, the grocery-getter, the ski-league sweeper, and, bit by bit, a collector of the oddest people in the county. That drift is the point. Mason is writing about a man hunting for purpose in a life that already holds one, and about a marriage quietly deciding who gets to worry about whom.
The Cast: Country People Worth the Title
The great pleasure of Country People by Daniel Mason is its supporting bench, a rogues’ gallery of the rural eccentric that never tips into mockery.
The Eccentrics You Will Not Forget
- Andrei, a burnt-out biochemist who cures his depression by taking up the scythe, and who pulls Miles into the strange peace of mowing a field by hand.
- Hugh, a wilderness guide whose whole personality is name-dropping the celebrities he once led on a nature walk, dispensing gossip in place of ecology.
- Miss Kayleigh Swan, Olive’s pregnant, camouflage-wearing, crossbow-carrying third-grade teacher, who patrols the forest for reasons that grow funnier and odder the more you learn.
- Snowflake Bentley, a photographer of ice crystals who keeps an “Inventory of Wrong Ideas” on index cards, cataloguing every delusion he meets.
The Legend That Will Not Let Go
Threaded through it all is a local story drawn from the writings of one Jeremiah Wylkes, a nineteenth-century pastor who claimed his lost dog led him to a hidden passage and a forgotten world beneath the mountains. Miles, half-amused and half-hooked, finds himself circling that tale, and the people who believe it, with a hunger he cannot quite explain. The blurb promises the legend “might not be just a legend after all,” and how Mason handles that promise is best left for you to discover.
Voice and Style: Folktale Cadence With a Comic Engine
If you loved the layered, land-haunted shape of North Woods, know that Country People by Daniel Mason moves differently. It is looser, warmer, and often flat-out hilarious. Mason narrates the early chapters in a fairy-tale register (Miles is “the husband,” Kate is “the wife”) that keeps a sly distance, then slowly lets real names and real ache seep through. Recurring interludes from a call-in radio show, The Miscellaneous Minute, let earnest Vermonters phone a garden expert about ten-inch worms with little blue eyes. These bits are comic set pieces that also carry the book’s spookier undercurrent while you are busy chuckling.
What the Book Does Especially Well
- Comic timing. The gas-station snack aisle, the lawnmower-speed humiliation at a faculty party, the celebrity-gossip nature hike. Mason lands them all.
- Marriage on the page. The passages about Kate’s illness and Miles standing by her are among the most affecting writing about a long partnership I have read this year.
- Place without the postcard. Vermont here is muddy, warming, priced out by second-home buyers, and fully alive.
- The Milton scaffolding. Lines from Paradise Lost drift through the prose, giving a story about a lost garden its unexpected weight.
Where It Wanders: An Honest Look at the Weak Spots
No book earns unqualified love, and this one has soft patches worth flagging for the right reader.
The structure is baggy on purpose, and that will divide people. For long stretches the novel is a string of beautifully observed episodes rather than a story pulling you forward, and the central legend arrives late and stays loose. If you read chiefly for momentum and a tidy payoff, the refusal to tighten may frustrate you. The satire, sharp as it is, sometimes runs to type: a few jokes about tech-bro baby names and rural signage feel broad next to the finer character work around them.
A Note on the Erudition
There is also the steady current of Milton, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, part of the book’s soul, yet readers who do not share Mason’s literary furniture may feel they are missing a private joke now and then. None of this sinks the novel. It just means the book asks for patience and repays the patient rather than the hurried.
Who Should Read It
This one is for a particular reader, and if that is you, it will feel written to order:
- Anyone who adored North Woods and wants Mason in a sunnier, funnier key.
- Readers who like literary fiction laced with real comedy and a whisper of the uncanny.
- Parents, partners, and anyone quietly wondering whether their own life is a history, a tragedy, or, if they are lucky, a comedy.
- Fans of small-town novels where the community is the true main character.
One Quick Word Before You Buy
Save it for later if you want a fast plot or a clean genre shape. This book wants to make you laugh and then catch you off guard with feeling, and it is unashamed about both.
About the Author
Daniel Mason is the author of six books, among them The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, The Winter Soldier, A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), and North Woods, a New York Times and Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2023. He is also an associate professor in the Stanford Department of Psychiatry, and that clinical eye shows. He writes about illness, obsession, and belief with a doctor’s patience and a storyteller’s mercy, never diagnosing his characters so much as loving them.
If You Liked It, Read These Next
A short shelf for readers who finish and want more of the same feeling:
- North Woods by Daniel Mason: the natural next step, or a perfect prelude, one plot of New England land across centuries.
- Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen: a family and its private faiths, rendered with roomy, generous attention.
- Bewilderment by Richard Powers: a father, a sensitive child, and the ache of a warming world.
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles: for its warmth, wit, and love of confinement turned into community.
- What We Can Know by Ian McEwan: a life measured across decades, tender and unhurried.
- The Overstory by Richard Powers: if the enchanted woods called to you loudest.
The Verdict
Country People by Daniel Mason is a warm, wandering, quietly wise book about marriage, parenthood, and the human need to believe in something just past the tree line. It is funnier than it has any right to be and sadder than it first lets on. It will not suit the reader who wants speed, and it strays where a tidier novel would turn. But for anyone willing to walk into the woods with Miles and his family, it offers something rare: a comedy that knows how much it is aching underneath, and a reminder that the stories we live by may matter more than whether they are true.