Shakespeare was wise to the fact that most folks prefer lighter entertainments in the summer. Hence, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that confection of a play in which Rustics and Royals and meddlesome Fairies collide in a forest. Country People, by Daniel Mason, is a satisfying spin on the Bard’s bubble of an amusement. For anyone slow to catch on, Mason even ends his novel with an elementary school performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The wanderers into a Vermont forest here are not exactly royals, but, you might say they’re the kind of people Jefferson had in mind when he proposed that the United States be governed, not by an inherited aristocracy, but by an aristocracy of the intellect. Or perhaps not.
Kate is a hotshot; a distinguished scholar of Blake and Milton. Currently teaching in California, she’s been offered a one-year visiting professorship at a college in Vermont. Miles, her husband, has been working (sort of) on his dissertation for the past 14 years — something to do with Russian folklore.
To be fair, though, Miles, an eternal graduate student, does provide caretaking to the couple’s two young children, as well as for Kate, who’s been diagnosed with MS. He also tends to their dog, Giuseppe, who’s possessed, much like Miles himself, of a fairly useless skill: Giuseppe has been bred to hunt truffles.
Energized by the thought of a year in a new place, the family drives cross-country, arriving at a sylvan wood where they’ll live, suspiciously rent-free, in the house of a faculty member on sabbatical.
The digressive plot of Country People contains golden threads of academic farce. To my taste, passages like this one, contrasting Kate and Miles’ student evaluations, are some of the funniest in the novel. Our omniscient narrator tells us that:
[Kate] taught popular courses, which, according to her end-of-term teaching evaluations, were “super fun, and interesting!,” “probably not usful [sic] for a job, but still mind-blowing” …
Over the past decade, watching their course enrollments dwindle, [Kate’s] colleagues had been forced to pander, changing “English 7: Shakespeare” to “Sex in Shakespeare”; “English 28: Middlemarch” to “Learning Programming from Middlemarch (a Novel). … [But Kate] was hard core.
Again, according to our narrator, the reviews for the courses Miles taught as a teaching assistant described him as:
“nice,’ if “sometimes hard to follow,” and that he got “caught up in arcane topics, so that a lecture on Turgenev would somehow end in Ecuador.” Once, someone wrote that he was “disheveled, not in a gross way, in a nice way”; another wrote, “My friend … had a crush on him, which we thought was funny,” …
As the novel settles into Vermont, its humor shifts from the dry wit variety to the wacky excess of tall tales. Miles is jazzed to get to know some actual rural folk, since his dissertation, after all, involves peasants.
The locals he talks to on nature trails and in the waiting room of the emergency clinic espouse beliefs that make the witches and dragons of Russian folklore seem colorless by comparison. Flat-Earth theories and hollow-Earth theories abound, along with the conviction that the area is studded with massive subterranean “Super-Rat-Lines” — a veritable vermin expressway — one of which is said to run under the house Miles and his family now occupy.
And, seductive fairies spring up in the shape of a children’s ski coach and an erotically-charged drama teacher who entices Miles into helping her stage an un-bowdlerized version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. To inevitably quote Puck’s immortal line, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
Thanks to Mason’s own magic touch as a writer, Country People mostly charms rather than condescends. Sometimes his jokes do go on for too long — like the footnote, sprawling over three pages, listing adults who attended the school play; and, sometimes, much like the Hollow Earthers, I was conscious of the absence of a solid core to this novel. But, then, I reminded myself that silliness for its own sake is an underrated virtue in art, and there’s silliness aplenty in Country People to keep readers entertained.
