There is a particular strain of American story about the family that moves to the country chasing some quieter, truer version of life, and Daniel Mason’s Country People knows exactly how that story usually goes before gleefully declining to go there. This is the July pick for Good Morning America’s Book Club, and it arrives from Mason, the Pulitzer Prize finalist behind North Woods, with the same restless curiosity about place and the odd people who inhabit it.
The setup is disarmingly modest. Miles Krzelewski, a devoted husband and doting father best known to his children for his outlandish bedtime stories, relocates his California family to rural Vermont so he can finally finish a PhD on Russian folktales that is, by his own count, twelve years overdue. He is also the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a region that, as far as anyone can tell, has no truffles. Instead of quiet productivity, Miles finds himself pulled steadily into the town’s eccentric cast and its tangle of local folklore, all while a creeping sense that he has become a disappointment to the people who love him refuses to leave him alone.
What makes the novel work is Mason’s voice, which critics have rightly compared to Nabokov’s Pnin for its blend of gentle absurdity and real ache. The comedy here is dry and specific rather than broad: Miles’s academic delays, his half-managed truffle business, and his tendency to narrate his own life as though it were one of the folktales he studies all accumulate into a portrait of a man both ridiculous and quietly sympathetic. Mason never lets the humor curdle into mockery. Underneath the comic set pieces sits a serious inquiry into displacement, the stories families tell to survive change, and the particular vulnerability of a man who has built his identity around unfinished work. The prose has the same patient attentiveness to landscape and community that made North Woods such a critical success, but the focus here is tighter, following one family’s disorientation rather than centuries of a single house.
Early critical reaction has been enthusiastic, with reviewers repeatedly reaching for words like witty and gorgeous to describe Mason’s control of tone, and praising the way the novel’s humor and heartbreak seem to arrive in the same sentence rather than taking turns. The Good Morning America Book Club selection has amplified that reception considerably, introducing Mason’s particular style of literary comfort read to an audience that might not have encountered his more historically sprawling earlier work. If there is a note of caution among admirers, it is that readers expecting the multi-generational scope of North Woods should recalibrate: this is a more intimate, single-family story, content to let its ambitions stay small and its observations run deep.
Country People succeeds because it trusts a simple premise, a man out of place, a family adjusting, a town full of characters who do not quite make sense until they do, to carry real emotional weight without ever losing its sense of humor about itself. It is a novel about disappointment that never once feels disappointing, and it confirms Mason as one of the more quietly essential voices in contemporary American fiction.
As an Amazon Associate, VIRA Broadcasting earns from qualifying purchases.