North Woods

North Woods (2023) is author Daniel Mason’s fourth novel. Mason is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, but his literary work has received positive acclaim. North Woods was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ choice and included in multiple Best Book of the Year lists. Mason’s story collection, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020), became a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist and won a California Book Award. Other novels by Mason include The Piano Tuner (2003), A Far Country (2007), and The Winter Soldier (2018). North Woods is categorized as Historical Literary Fiction and Contemporary Literary Fiction.

This study guide and all its page citations are based on the Random House 2023 Kindle edition of the novel.

Content Warning: The novel and this guide refer to deadly acts of violence and attempted death by suicide.

Plot Summary

The novel’s events span a period from the mid-1600s to the present day and transpire against the backdrop of a single location: a fictional region of western Massachusetts known simply as the north woods. Many different characters inhabit this spot, first in a rustic cabin and later in a yellow house built next to the cabin. The text tells the stories of each generation largely through limited third-person narration from the perspective of the principal character living there during a particular era. Some segments of the novel unfold through first-person narration in the form of letters or memoranda written by the main character of a particular section. In following the lives of a varied set of characters over a broad swath of US history, the novel explores the themes of Paradise Lost, The Narrative Puzzle, and The Land as Silent Witness.

The first story concerns an anonymous pair of young lovers who are fleeing the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay. They wish to escape its repressive atmosphere and build a life for themselves in the wild mountain region to the west. When they find a suitable location, they build a cabin and begin farming. The story picks up decades later, after Indigenous warriors have massacred a Puritan village. The warriors carry off a young wife and her infant son as captives, along with many others. When the young mother grows ill, she and her baby are deposited at the cabin of an elderly English woman, who nurses her back to health. This is the same woman who eloped with her lover decades earlier. He has since died, but she has remained in the north woods.

The girl comes to trust the elderly woman despite the latter’s friendship with the Indigenous people. When three English scouts arrive, the captive girl is overjoyed until she learns that they plan to massacre an Indigenous village nearby. One of the men offers the girl a bite of an apple, which she refuses. The cruelty of the scouts offends the woman, and she poisons their dinner with a species of mushroom called Nightmaid. In the fight that ensues after the men realize they’ve been poisoned, the woman is shot, and the girl must kill the other men with an axe to save her son. She then writes the history of these events in the margins of the elderly woman’s Bible, buries the four corpses, and leaves.

Many years later, the seeds of the apple in the scout’s stomach germinate and grow into an apple tree. In the mid-1700s, a man named Charles Osgood arrives, looking for the ideal place to start an orchard. After tasting one of the apples from the tree, he creates a varietal called the Osgood Wonder and starts an orchard business with his twin daughters. They build a yellow house adjoining the original cabin. When Osgood goes off to fight in the Revolutionary War, his daughters, Mary and Alice, carry on the family business. Mary continually thwarts Alice’s attempts to marry and leave her behind. When they’re in their sixties, Alice’s dalliance with a neighbor enrages Mary, and she kills her sibling with an axe. Growing terminally ill soon afterward, Mary places her sister’s body below the floorboards of the pantry and joins her there for eternity.

The next occupant of the yellow house, during the mid-1800s, is an enslaved girl named Esther. She ran away from a plantation in Maryland and takes shelter in the house on her way to Canada to find her husband. A bounty hunter named Phelan pursues her, but he’s killed by the Mary’s axe-wielding ghost. Esther is free to continue her journey, and she takes with her the Bible containing the “Nightmaids” Letter.

A successful landscape artist named William Henry Teale is the next resident of the yellow house. He expands and renovates the place for his wife and three children. Teale carries on an active correspondence with a well-known writer named Erasmus Nash. The two men eventually start a torrid romance in the north woods, but their wives both discover their secret. The men end the affair to prevent scandal, and Teale spends the rest of his life in the yellow house, tended only by a nurse named Ana.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a button manufacturer named Farnsworth purchases the house. An avid sportsman, he expands the house and christens it Catamount Lodge after the nearly extinct mountain lion species of the area. His plans for a hunting lodge are complicated by the ghostly presence of Teale and Nash, who have resumed their amorous activities. A charlatan psychic named Anastasia is called in for a seance. To her surprise, she channels the ghosts of the two men and also Charles Osgood, who wants to know what became of his apple trees.

Farnsworth’s granddaughter, Lillian, inherits the yellow house in the 1930s. She has a daughter, Helen, and a son, Robert. Robert is diagnosed with “schizophrenia.” He can see and hear the ghosts of the house and communicate with them. In his later years, he tries to capture them on film. After his death, his sister Helen inherits the film reels but sees nothing but the empty woods in the films.

Late in the 20th century, the “Nightmaids” Letter is found and published in academic circles. It arouses the curiosity of amateur historian Morris Lakeman, who is on the verge of connecting all the dots to reveal the full history of the north woods when he experiences a heart attack and dies. After his death, he becomes Alice Osgood’s lover.

In the current era, a botanist named Nora has a car accident in the north woods and dies. She encounters Charles Osgood’s ghost and agrees to stay in the newly renovated yellow house. There, she passes many centuries watching the changes that the land undergoes, including the destruction of the yellow house by fire. Rather than mourning the lost past of the north woods, Nora philosophically recognizes the constancy of change and anticipates the beginning of a new cycle of growth.