Can You Dig It?
Daniel Mason’s “Country People” follows an incurable dreamer into a world of folktales, rabbit holes, and underground mysteries.
The Tuesday Review
No one is likely to ask Daniel Mason, “Is Country People really about you?”
His effervescent new novel is about Miles Krzelewski, a perpetual graduate student who’s done little with his life but start and abandon 11 dissertations.
Mason has the opposite problem. He knocked off his bestselling debut novel, The Piano Tuner, in 2002 as he was working on a medical degree. Since then, he’s published several more terrific works of fiction — including, most recently, North Woods — and been a Pulitzer finalist, all while teaching and researching in Stanford University’s psychiatry department.
The good doctor seems positively allergic to idleness.
But you don’t need a psychiatry degree to see the connection between this funny novel and the lightly repressed enchantment that bubbles through even Mason’s most haunting books. Faeries of wit and mischief have always danced around his fiction, whether he’s pursuing a piano through the Burmese jungle or taking an ax to a twin sister.
In the pages of Country People, those whimsical sprites have been given free rein. This story of self-delusions, bizarre eccentrics, and absurd antics is narrated in an arch, long-suffering voice that brings out the comic flavor like salt on caramel. Think of it as a companion to Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco. One comic novel this good feels lucky; two in the same summer feels like cheating.
When we meet Miles, 44, he’s been working on the first draft of his dissertation on Russian folktales for 14 years, and, let’s face it, the end is nowhere in sight. It’s not that he lacks the requisite intellectual rigor (in high school he taught himself Basque because so few people speak it), but he has the attention span of an erudite squirrel. His wife, meanwhile, is an academic superstar, who’s been offered a one-year position at a posh college in Vermont. So, as the novel begins, they load up their Italian dog and two children, say goodbye to San Francisco, and set off across the country.
Miles is sufficiently self-aware to appreciate the burden of his good fortune, which is stacked perilously high. After all, his wife is “a woman of beauty and intelligence, who could have chosen any number of wealthy suitors.” Her students regularly report being inspired and moved to tears by her lectures, while Miles’s students say he’s “nice.” She illuminates Milton, the colossus of English literature; he studies bedtime stories for children.
What man wouldn’t wilt next to the heat of such a companion?
His wife gamely hopes that mingling with actual country people might give him the practical experience to understand Russian peasants with even greater sympathy. And who knows, perhaps a year spent inhaling the invigorating air of the Green Mountain State will spur Miles to finally finish his dissertation and become the figure he imagines, in moments of increasingly strained optimism, he could be.
Reader, there is not sufficient invigorating air in the whole world to effect such a transformation.
I asked Daniel Mason, “What is it about the gap between who we are and who we imagine we’ll be that fascinates you?”
Much of the novel’s early comedy reads like Green Acres by way of Chekhov. Miles is an enthusiastic dilettante who dreams of becoming a farmer based solely on the knowledge of beekeeping he’s derived from Anna Karenina. As a denizen of San Francisco, he’s astonished at the wonders of nonorganic food: “Who was this Sara Lee of such extraordinary industry?” he wonders. Everything about the non-tech-based lives of these Vermonters charms him. “Miles’s heart quickened — could this be a real country person?” And look here: “a classic New England church, not a church converted into a loft or a restaurant, but a true, functional church with bells ringing, and New English people walking benevolently from its doors.”
Drawing on his own family’s year in New England during the Covid pandemic, Mason is hilarious with this West Coast fetishization of ordinary rural life. As a lifelong academic himself, he knows every arcane footnote that a fellow like Miles would append to, say, a third-grade play or a swimmin’ hole.
The plot of Country People is no more disciplined than the family’s Italian dog, which chases down every stray scent. This novel never meets a roadside attraction it can resist. But soon enough, all these quirky encounters and diversions accrue into a stalagmite of real mystery. Miles discovers a group of spelunkers and amateur historians searching for a lost paradise deep underground, guided by a curious testimony that sounds as though it were written by Jules Verne or Edgar Allan Poe. They all seem like folks who could make a tinfoil hat by candlelight — one of them is assembling a vast catalogue of human fallacies in his van.
But for Miles, who’s always running down rabbit holes, these folks venturing down actual rabbit holes are natural allies — and didn’t his wife encourage him to make new friends? Their reports of a hidden world beneath Vermont don’t sound any stranger than the Russian folktales that have occupied him for years. No matter where you come down on the Inner Earth Theory, you’ll be moved by their camaraderie.
As a similarly earnest but incompetent man who never finished his own dissertation, I may be guilty of a certain degree of over-identification with Miles. It’s possible that this chronically distracted character whom I enjoyed so much will strike some women readers as a tedious reminder of their first husband.
But I hope not. For all his infuriating indirection, Miles remains tremendously endearing. Mason has written a comedy about a man who can’t quite secure his place above ground but senses the wonder lurking just beneath our feet. That and a beloved Italian dog who digs through every pillow, sofa, and floor are all you really need for a book to make the world feel a little lighter, a little warmer.◆
Country People, by Daniel Mason (Random House, 320 pp. $30)
Previous review: There Goes the Neighborhood
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Major flashback -- 1 of my best professors when I was an undergraduate was a "Miles". He thought he had to write the perfect dissertation. Since that's impossible, it never was finished. In the meantime his wife, who had been the good stay-at-home mom to their 4 children, got her BA, MA, and PhD and filed for divorce. I often wonder what happened to him. Look forward to reading this book.
I read an advance digital copy. I found the book hysterically funny. Far too many highlighted passages to share. Just read it and enjoy. A perfect mini-vacation from the world as it is.