North Woods (4*)

Had I known North Woods would be populated by ghostly apparitions and set in a world of natural wonder, I probably would have dismissed it as too twee for me.  But Magda ranked this Rubik's Cube of a novel with All Fours as two of the best books she's read in years so I stuck patiently with the disorienting, occasionally confusing structure, although its chronology is quickly identifiable as an impressionistic history of America since its colonization.

Daniel Mason, clearly a writer with extraordinarily broad interests, mixes nature, Americana, pulp fiction, schizophrenia, family ties, clairvoyance, landscape painting and apples in a mysterious brew that occasionally intoxicates with empathy and ultimately soothes with a gradually revealed purpose.  Everything is connected if you look hard enough although the meaning may vanish with the relentless passage of time.

She was struck by the discrepancy in meaning the belongings presented. That death meant not only the cessation of a life, but vast worlds of significance. A candle that might have once provided comfort in the winter darkness, a shawl gifted by an erstwhile suitor, a pheasant that recalled her poor lost grandfather. Old brass, old rag, old bird.

47 Pianos, my apartment, in a nutshell.

A remote farmhouse in western Massachusetts that conceals murderous secrets and eventually becomes the pandemic retreat of a Hollywood actor, serves as the book's central metaphor.  Poison mushrooms are used to dispatch marauding colonizers; twin sisters suffer the violence of co-dependence long before the term comes into vogue; a damselfly landing on the knee of a transcendental essayist evokes a blushing response among West Coast literature students a century later for mistaken reasons; and a sensitive soul shoots film that records the transmogrified voices of these and other residents who coexist in the past and future.

Then, there, in the room of her empty house, or the archives of the library where one could still find such forgotten equipment, they would watch the screen light up before them—robin, sapling, eternal beetle—the images stripped of all their prior meaning, signifying nothing but the gentle motions of a forest that no longer was. 

As a young atheist, I once drove my motorcycle to Croton-on-Hudson on a brilliant autumn day, marveling at the beauty of the natural world.  "This is the only god that I can worship," I mused while biting into a crisp Red Delicious apple, a feeling that subsequently evinced a comforting economic corollary:  "A rich man can't enjoy a beautiful day any more than I can."

Daniel Mason's appreciation for nature is no less keen and a lot more esoteric, but in an entertaining way (his description of an elm bark beetle's mating dance is funnier than American Pie).  Even better, he manages to maintain his optimism, even in the onslaught of horrors that have beset the American environment--both manmade and not--since the beginning of time.

.  . . she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change. 

North Woods isn't an easy read, but it's an extraordinarily hopeful one.