Miles Krzelewski is 45 and fourteen years into a dissertation on Russian folktales that keeps changing topic every time it gets hard. His wife Kate lands a one-year visiting professorship at a college in Vermont, so the whole family — two kids and a truffle dog in a place with no truffles — packs up and leaves California for the Green Mountains. Miles tells himself this is the year he finishes. What he actually does is watch the kids and get slowly overtaken by the woods. Mason narrates the whole thing in a dry, sideways voice that keeps sliding into folktale cadence, until you can’t always tell whether the strange stuff is happening or Miles just wants it to. Same writer as North Woods, working the same ground.
Country People