North Woods
A single house in the woods of Massachusetts across four centuries. Each chapter tells the story of a different inhabitant in a different genre, from colonial sermon to true crime. Mason's formally dazzling novel about place, time, and what endures is one of the great American novels of the decade.
North Woods holds for roughly the first 150 to 200 pages, then loses steam for long stretches after; one reader admits “mostly skimmed the last third.” The extended medical case notes and the beetle-mating passage draw the same question from disappointed readers, namely what these detours are doing there, with no clear payoff supplied. Because each chapter resets to a new inhabitant, whatever pull built with one household vanishes at the jump to the next. The ghost material runs heavier than expected too, one reviewer noting “Zero ghosts being an ideal number,” tilting the book toward bleak rather than wondrous. A critic sums it up as “A hodgepodge narrative, brazenly disjointed in time, perspective and form,” calling it “more fanciful than fulfilling.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
