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"Country People" | Reviewed by William Winkler
American author Daniel Mason is a psychiatrist on the staff of Stanford Hospital and a professor of writing at Stanford University. His most recent novel, “Country People,” is set in southern Vermont.
Kate and Miles, she a Ph.D. professor of English Literature, he a frustrated academic struggling to complete a doctoral thesis on Russian folklore, have moved to Vermont, where Kate has accepted a 1-year visiting professorship at a prestigious liberal arts college. They, with their two children, Wesley and Olive, and their dog Giuseppe, moved into a house offered to them by a professor of economics enjoying a 1-year sabbatical in Europe.
The family is Californian through and through, having never lived outside the Golden State. They have accepted the fact that a move to rural New England would be a culture shock, the degree of which they were unable to predict.
Kate had little time to acclimate to her new surroundings, pressured to develop syllabi for the classes she was scheduled to teach. Miles, on the other hand, felt free to explore this new world in which they found themselves. In doing so he found himself falling into relationships with a host of colorful locals.
Among his new acquaintances were members of a society dedicated to studying the writings of Jeremiah Wylkes, an early settler of the region who claimed to have discovered a hidden passageway leading to a utopian subterranean civilization. Unrealistic as it might seem, these adherents felt Wylkes had stumbled onto something truly amazing, and they were dedicated to searching for, and finding, the passage he described in his writings.
As Kate, Miles, and their children develop relationships with their new neighbors they discover many of them, seemingly ordinary citizens on the surface, lead lives more deeply nuanced, and far more interesting than appearances would suggest.
“Country People” is written with a wry sense of humor. The author, who spent his undergraduate years in New England, introduces the reader to a fascinating glimpse of a culture unique in its regional appeal.
