Daniel Mason, _North Woods_

 SO, I AM wondering, how does Daniel Mason maintain an enviable career as a novelist--this, his fifth, was a NYTBR "10 Best Books of 2023" honoree, and A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth was a Pulitzer Prize finalist--while also handling his duties as an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford--Stanford!--a position that the author's bio tells me he holds. I mean, how does one do all that? 

North Woods has an unusual structure in that the main element of continuity is neither a character nor a plot but a setting, an old house in a wooded area in a remote part of western Massachusetts. The first version of the house, apparently rudimentary, was thrown together by a pair of lovers escaping the Puritanic rigors of Plymouth. It was added to over the years by a retired soldier who wants to grow apples and later by a wealthy man who wanted to turn it into a hunting lodge, but it finally falls into ruin, its abandoned grounds visited by amateur archaeologists and dendrologists.

So we get the longue durée of a novel like, say, Yaa Gyasi's Homecoming, but instead of following a family's genealogy, we see the transformations of a certain place, as in Prairyerth, William Least Heat Moon's non-fiction "deep map" of central Kansas.

Mason keeps this all moving along with well-tempered prose and intriguing characters (spirit mediums, lobotomy practitioners). We don't get to spend more than a chapter or two with any character, which is somewhat unfortunate, because of all of them are distinct enough to be interesting. Mason incorporates a supernatural element, though, that means that some of the characters, or their traces, reappear when we are not expecting them. And then there is that mountain lion. And that ax.