pagesofjulia

A gift from a dear friend, this novel is different. It could be categorized as a collection of linked shorts, in various formats (formally playful, you might say), including epistolary. The stories that make up North Woods are connected across history by place: together, they track a single location, a small valley in what will become western Massachusetts, from early colonial America until the more-or-less present and into the future. We are used to novels and stories being connected by character or plot. We are familiar with stories that center place heavily – I’m thinking of Rebecca, Housekeeping, The City We Became, The Rope Swing. This one felt a bit more… kaleidoscopic.

They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, following deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs.

Fast they ran!

So opens the novel, and it takes several paragraphs until the reference to ‘harquebuses‘ (I had to look it up) gives us a clue as to setting in time. I loved how the fens and meadows, bramble and thickets, bear caves and tree hollows could have been anywhen. The couple who run remain nameless, and we learn very little of their story in their four-page chapter, but we see them stop in a valley: “a clearing, beaver stumps and pale-green seedlings rising from the rich black ash.” “Here,” says the man, and there they stop with their chicken and their squash and corn seeds and fragments of potato. And scene.

Subsequent residents – most of them human – find the log and stone hut built by this original couple, experience joys and hardships there, and add to that structure. A veteran of the American Revolution establishes an apple orchard. His twin daughters, after his death, grow old preserving his legacy and bickering with each other, unto a shocking end. A mountain lion briefly occupies the abandoned dwelling, hoarding her kills. A slave catcher hunts other prey in the area, eventually homing in on the house in the overgrown orchard, but will not find what he seeks. A painter finds a haven there, in a gorgeous valley where he can observe nature and work on landscapes and studies of birds nests, fungus, and trees; he pursues a forbidden love. In his old age, a nurse comes to assist him, and finds a love of her own that will fare no better. (It begins to feel like the home in the valley, at this point with many additions and “improvements,” might be a site of bad luck.) A mystic plies her trade, claiming to drive out a haunting, but has bitten off a bigger haunting than she’s realized. The chestnut blight settles in. A mother struggles to care for her disturbed son, who is schizophrenic, or haunted, or maybe both (?). The son wrestles with his delusions, or, his heightened knowledge of reality; his sister, an academic on the west coast, grapples with her brother’s life’s work. A newlywed couple lives out a fantasy, and a bark beetle expresses its lusts in parallel, in one of the weirder sections of this novel (and that’s saying something). (The chapters that feature nonhuman characters – spores, beetles, panthers – are delightfully immersive, but also somehow inherently creepy, in a way that feels anthropomorphic.) A lonely old woman narrowly avoids a dangerous con artist, a crime writer discovers an ancient grave, a metal detectorist goes seeking evidence, and a graduate student searches for spring ephemerals but encounters a ghost. The world turns.

It was a fascinating experience to sink into this place. There were not many characters or episodes to like or even especially enjoy; there was often a sense of watching something disquieting take place. I definitely loved the consideration of place over time, the natural world, and the different ways we interact with it. I loved the orchardist, the painter, and the graduate student most of all. I do love a zoom in on a procreative beetle. It was a disjointed experience, one I’ll not soon forget, but also don’t feel a firm grasp of. Maybe I need more time out of this book to figure out what it did for me. Maybe this is an instance of the author demonstrated prowess for its own sake. (As ever, your mileage may vary.) If you get into it, please do let me know what you think.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: historical fiction, nature, sense of place |