Many great novelists and writers have engaged in dual careers. Isaac Asimov bridged the worlds of working physicist and science fiction author; Lewis Carroll was a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford and the pen behind wondrous and bizarre stories such as “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Philip Larkin was directing the University of Hull library while writing “The Whitsun Weddings” and many of his other great works of poetry.
What could be more challenging than holding down a full time job and producing great literary works? The very act of doing both requires, it seems, an extraordinary amount of ambition and remarkably precise time management skills—not to mention a brilliant and agile mind.
Daniel Mason, the author of the library’s One Read book “North Woods,” is one such extraordinary individual. He has written five unique and popular novels and a collection of essays and short stories—all while serving as a teaching professor of psychiatry at Stanford University Medical School, in one of the most rigorous academic settings in the world. Mason’s very first book, “Piano Tuner,” was published to immediate, near-universal critical acclaim and was even adapted into a movie screenplay—a rare feat for any writer.
Mason’s sublime early works take place in unfamiliar lands and obscure circumstances. Imagine: a piano technician in Burma? A profoundly displaced person in an unnamed, religiously fevered land, as in “A Far Country?” Consider his third novel, “The Winter Soldier.” Many excellent works of fiction have been written about life and war on the Eastern Front during World War II; Kate Quinn’s recent “The Diamond Eye” comes to mind. Another is Theodore Plievier’s haunting and brutal novel “Stalingrad,” now only in print in French and German language editions. But to my knowledge, nary a work of fiction addresses the Eastern Front and surrounding circumstances during World War I. Mason tackles the subject head-on in “The Winter Soldier,” which partially reads like a history lesson for a time and place largely forgotten.
Mason’s expansive approach to storytelling isn’t confined to prose. His short story collection “A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth” contains drawings and sketches. Intricate renderings, such as that of a telegraph machine preceding the short story “The Line Agent Pascal” are interspersed throughout this collection. “North Woods” includes similar illustrations that lend additional meaning and verisimilitude to the novel. The illustrations are not just confined to etchings and drawings; one finds photographs, renderings from old almanacs, diary entries, real photographs from historical societies. Indeed, the chapter in the “North Woods” called “The doleful account of the OWL” is just one long iambic pentameter poem.
What sets “North Woods” apart from Mason’s earlier novels is that, in many ways, it is the thematic inversion of the fantastical and enigmatic places he explores in previous works. “North Woods” is not a novel about displacement—it is a novel about place. It is not about alienation through travel and foreign lands, but the odd, fantastical and sometimes ruinous landscapes and psychological topography one might find in rootedness and home. The reader may reflect, while reading the book, that time is the greatest traveler of all. The adage that “the only constant is change” becomes an apt metaphor, especially when one considers the overwhelming upheavals that both American culture and landscapes have undergone since the 1700s.
Indeed, one is prompted to ask, at the end of “North Woods,” in chapter “3 Bd, 2 Ba.”: If we became time travelers, would we even recognize the land or house in which we once lived? Is time itself a foreign land? I often drive by the house I grew up in, in a small town near the Iowa border, and imagine myself there again—growing old.
We can never truly go home again.
