North Woods (2023)

By Daniel Mason 

Genre: Expansive Novel That Spans Centuries But Stays In One Place, Letting The Stories Come To It

Recommended For: Someone Who Has Stood In Front Of Something And Considered All That Particular Thing Has Seen Over The Many Years It Has Been Around

I spent the two years leading right up to the pandemic working on a story about music’s relationship to physical space. Not necessarily from a strictly audio sense but more from a cultural sense. I was writing about a neighborhood that, for more than 100 years, kept generating significant historical movements in music. 

Those movements, despite being deeply influential to the shape of American music - from Elvis to Dylan to Frank Ocean and onward (truly don’t get me started on this topic) - did not get much national coverage. The movements were also disconnected and spread out with decades between each other. The orchestrators of each era had seemingly little to no knowledge of the previous era. The city surrounding the neighborhood did nothing to encourage those movements from happening. If anything, it was an active detriment to the musical vibrancy of the neighborhood more often than not. 

So, the thing I’m getting at is how? Why? By all accounts, it feels like an unrealistic number of coincidences over the course of more than a century. 

My job for that story wasn’t to answer that question. It was to tell a story. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to know. At the time that the story was getting wrapped up, there were some final edits that I needed to address on it before the whole thing would be finalized. I wanted to make sure I did them in the neighborhood. I’d spent so much time talking to people about the area and thinking about it. It wouldn’t have felt right if the final word was written anywhere else. 

I wrapped things up in a cafe, and I closed my laptop and then walked around. In certain alleys, there were train rails from 70 years past. Most of the storefronts are brick exteriors, maintained with some degree of historic preservation. 

When you let yourself think about physical space and whether it can have an active relationship with time, you’re not trying to change the way you believe in what’s real. You’re not trying to channel any sort of mysticism that undoes anything we already know about, you know, science. 

All you’re really doing is wondering. You’re wondering if things that we can touch or walk on might absorb something that occurs among it. Is there any theoretical way that might be happening? If I tell you something - literally anything; if I just say the word “bubblegum” to you - that technically changes your life in a way that cannot be undone. That’s how the butterfly effect works. You carry that with you. You might forget it quickly, but it could change your mood, or it might remind you of something or it might occupy space in your brain that causes you to forget something and all of that can alter an action you might take or don’t take. 

Physical spaces don’t have minds or memories. But they have tenants. And while there’s nothing more reliable than a written (or maybe spoken) record, I don’t think you have to put a tinfoil hat on your head to suggest that the history of a place carries on because its memories are bouncing off the tenants over the years. They don’t know it, necessarily. But that doesn’t mean they can’t perpetuate something if the inkling is intriguing enough and it grabs ahold of them. 

People leave places over the years. They even die, if you wait long enough. But as they pass through, memories fall from them like seeds as literally anyone in that area experiences their conviction, laughs along with them, hears their songs or generally tries to understand them.

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North Woods spans hundreds of years. Mason establishes a little plot of land in the Northeast and lets us see it change ownership and perspectives 12 times over as a couple centuries tick by. It’s straightforward for the first third or so. It’s pretty well-established that we will follow the tenants of this house closely and that’s that, so you should buckle in for their stories. 

When we follow a slave catcher who eventually corners a slave into the house, we get our first taste of stories colliding, a bit of a supernatural component that, after many pages of “yes, this is how life was back then” jolts you awake with a little bit of “OK, wow, I didn’t know we were playing by these rules,” and that momentum makes you sit up a little straighter as you read for the rest of the book. 

I will admit that this book was recommended to me after I was raving about The Overstory as something I might also like, and while that’s a pretty fair suggestion, it possibly left North Woods at a disadvantage in my case. The Overstory rocked me at every page and changed my current worldview. So, I spent a little bit of the book being a jerk, like “I’ve met The Overstory, and you sir are no The Over Story.” 

But as I discussed up top, these ideas of time and space and memories are on my mind a lot. I like to wonder about the possibility that people and animals and plants and stories and memories could refute the notion that locations actually are not totally inanimate. So, I can appreciate the massive task that Mason set out for with this novel. 

Unlike me, who can only ramble about this topic, Mason had to end his book, something that I would have considered just about impossible. He didn’t answer any of my questions, but he stuck the landing. And within the context of everything already said, you can probably imagine, it looks beautiful.

3 More Things You Can Read Today:

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The Jimmy Kimmel news you should be watching:

I know y’all heard a lot about Jimmy Kimmel last month, but the real big development was that Living Colour appeared on his show to perform Cult of Personality, and you deserve to bask in that.