North Woods

When a book is on almost every "Top 10" list for a year and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, it's got to be good, right? Well...maybe not.

North Woods is set in northwest Massachusetts, centered mostly around a piece of land and the people who inhabit it over the course of nearly 400 years. We trace the area's evolution from an uninhabited wilderness to an apple orchard and eventually to the creation of a homestead. The home is occupied by a series of unrelated characters -- this is not a novel that follows the same family over several generations, but rather one centered on the location.

While dubbed a novel, it is more a series of vignettes, short stories, songs, diary entries, and various other forms of written media that are loosely connected. We meet a parade of people who produce a set of loose connection points across the vignettes through lightly related events, remnants they've left behind, or (in a few cases) their restless spirits that haunt the home. The connections between the characters and stories are limited and varied, and I was most often left with a furrowed and confused brow than a knowing smile when finishing a segment of the book.

The jacket quote from Maggie O'Farrell is an accurate representation -- polyphony is the best thing this novel has going for it. It's a fascinating literary work, in the sense that it's hard to believe a single author created the multitude of voices, narrators, and speech patterns present in the novel. In particular, Mason uses vernacular, spelling and grammar consistent with the time in which each vignette takes place, and does so convincingly. However, that doesn't necessarily make the work as a whole effective. The separate polyphonic parts never fully harmonize with each other.

I kept waiting for an a-ha moment, a big reveal at the end that tied everything together, and while there are strands that connect the stories, I think the ultimate binding thread is thin and somewhat forced. The only thing boosting this to 3 stars is the author's achievement. It's uniquely and impressively written, but the writing is not enough to compensate for its failure to fully coalesce into something special. You can skip this one.