I don’t know how to summarize this book – a potpourri of genres (although mostly historical fiction, if you had to pinpoint it), a truly eclectic cast of characters, and incredible prose. The kind of book where you think about the characters after the book is closed, and you puzzle over the last chapter even though he totally stuck the landing (endings are so hard!)
Mason somehow describes both the forest and the trees in a very readable and really kinda weird novel. He sharply observes human characters’ foibles and delicate, abstract shifts of emotion; he notes the tiniest details of history-specific language and local flora; he also paints the mind-boggling wingspans of Time and Nature with a broad and poetic brush.
The plot: three centuries of lives and deaths in Western Massachusetts, told sort of from the perspective of a single house, which grows, changes, falls into disrepair, is sold, claimed, resold, and ignored. As one character notes, upon arriving in the area, “…out here, no one tears down — one just adds upon, agglutinates, house to house, shed to shed, like some monstrous German noun.”
I thought I had a handle on what type of book this was until about a third of the way through, when it kind of turns into a ghost story (but not really?) I adjusted my expectations, only to have to reevaluate them again and again until the final chapter, which was so beautifully penned and so strange and grand and hopeful, while also being surprisingly sobering, for a maybe-ghost story.
My only little complaint is one that I always have with these sorts of generations-spanning books (I’m looking at you Pachinko) – too many pages spent in the present era. In the case of this book I think he redeems it by tying together so many little ideas (and ghosts) in the final chapter and spending just a few pages in the 2020s…but there definitely was a point where I looked at the number of pages left and realized we were already in the 1960s and was sad that we didn’t have a few more chapters with more historical weirdos.
But really, a minor complaint. This is a creative, thoughtful, engaging book that would be a great book club read!