Wonderfully dry, intellectually frisky ... Mason...is a lively, fluid writer; here he glides smoothly between present and past, myth and everyday detail, skepticism and credulity ... Never gets too self-consciously quirky; Miles may have his head in the clouds, but the novel has its feet on the ground, even as it plays with the idea of a world beneath the ground. It is also, simply put, very funny ... Infectious ... The book’s barbs are pointed but not mean.
Modest and manageable, a prescription for summer amusement that takes immediate effect ... It is lovely if occasionally confounding company, like going in and out of a thick mist ... While the prose of Country People, flows like a babbling brook, its depiction of the agony and bliss of procrastination is the world-class work of someone who must know ... If these Hollow Earthers exist merely to impart something profound or practical that will ground our drifting scholar, so be it. There’s so much fine, freewheeling observation and pillowy erudition here, it’s tempting just to sink in.
A romp that unfolds over a single academic year and playfully explores the power of storytelling, family, and community ... Mason is a psychiatrist and associate professor in Stanford University’s Department of Psychiatry as well as a writer. His interest in the interplay between literature, history, and medical practice informs his fiction. In Country People, he highlights – with levity and humor – how erroneous ideas, gullibility, and blinders can lead even people who should know better down rabbit holes, and what it takes to tunnel one’s way out.
Whimsical sprites have been given free rein. This story of self-delusions, bizarre eccentrics, and absurd antics is narrated in an arch, long-suffering voice that brings out the comic flavor like salt on caramel ... The plot of Country People is no more disciplined than the family’s Italian dog, which chases down every stray scent. This novel never meets a roadside attraction it can resist. But soon enough, all these quirky encounters and diversions accrue into a stalagmite of real mystery ... It’s possible that this chronically distracted character whom I enjoyed so much will strike some women readers as a tedious reminder of their first husband. But I hope not. For all his infuriating indirection, Miles remains tremendously endearing. Mason has written a comedy about a man who can’t quite secure his place above ground but senses the wonder lurking just beneath our feet.
His latest is built for pleasure. It has a boisterous cast of two dozen or so characters, every one of whom is funny, means well and is trying to do what’s best ... Its tone is bright and forgiving ... It’s a mighty inviting book. Don’t expect much in terms of plot but do expect a big-hearted narrator whose wry sense of humor recalls a gentler David Sedaris and whose curiosity about the mysteries of his new home verges on childlike.
Mason turns his attention to literature and mines the rich seams of text, from myths to Milton to Shakespeare to Tolstoy and all points in between ... The risk with material as fantastical as this, of course, is that it collapses under the weight of its own whimsy. This is a pitfall Mason sidesteps with ease. The surface structures in Country People may be sugar-spun, but the novel’s foundations are solid, and its roots – the tangled and interconnected web of stories that gave rise to its new stories – are deliciously deep.
The book meanders quite pleasantly for a couple of hundred pages ... This is where the novel ought to come alive. Instead it loses its nerve ... Mason’s prose is lightly ironic, full of playful narrative sleights of hand. But where in North Woods the mosaic of voices over centuries gradually resolves into a satisfying whole, here the fragments never quite cohere.
Mason specializes in tender moments, often connected to the natural world ... Country People is also the sort of novel in which the reader is occasionally addressed as the reader; in which the narrative is broken periodically by the transcript of a radio show; and in which a lengthy footnote offers a playful aside to the moment at hand. The novel would have benefited from a little less cuteness, a little more asperity and a more restrained approach to self-awareness.
Mason here returns to his regular themes, in particular the peculiarities of literary forms ... But there is a lighter, freewheeling aspect to this book. Mason creates an amused omniscient narrative voice and delivers a likeable cast of weird country folk ... Mason wraps things up perhaps a little too neatly (one senses an eye on the television rights) and the book has a possibly deliberately kitsch cover of shaggy dogs looking down a hole, which seems a weak choice for a novel brimming with quirky imagery. But, style flaws aside, Country People is a lot of fun ... Sometimes sentimental, unashamedly whimsical, the story provides a perfect summer escape from the tech-crazed news cycle.
Country People charts a year when his more successful wife accepts a visiting professorship in rural Vermont, and the family moves from gluten-free California to the depths of white-bread New England.
There follows a small-town caper fit for a Frank Capra adaptation. But a good one. Over a rewarding, if somewhat rambling 314 pages, Mason explores everything from marital fragility, parenting, misguided ambition, true love and rascally dogs that dig up carpets ... Overall, Mason deftly delivers larks aplenty, poignancy, gentle satire and some top-tier farce. Be warned that the latter may cause you to spontaneously erupt with mirth in public places. This book dispels gloom; go for it.
Mason favors an elastic, lightly ironic voice that drifts among observation, anecdote, and reflection. The narrative structure is playful, occasionally intrusive, and permissive; it wanders, doubles back, incorporates fragments that seem, at first, peripheral. The humor—dry, humane, occasionally absurd—is ever-present ... The Vermont setting, spare and bracing, acts as a quiet amplifier of these idiosyncrasies, while Mason remains attuned to the natural world. Into this landscape he introduces a thread of the uncanny, a local legend that hovers between conspiracy theory and genuine mystery.
Quiet yet richly colored ... Mason’s latest will appeal to readers interested in humorous, character-driven investigations of contemporary American life.
