This novel was partially read at Kalimna, Yeranda Cottages, Main Creek (Dungog) NSW, August 2026
Becoming lost in life is far easier than we might think.
Oh, we march from the vivaciously assured certainty of youth, inwardly adamant that we know we are, what we want and how we will get it.
And that we will hold it securely in our hands far sooner than not.
Then, suddenly, we find ourselves unsure that what we’re holding is what we want, and that while there are some good things in hand, things we treasure in fact, we find ourselves wondering why we can’t quite seem to close the circle, why that much-expected sense of triumphant all-round completion eludes us.
Someone who understands exactly how this feels is Miles Krzelewski , protagonist of Daniel Mason’s Country People who, if you had asked him before an offer of a visiting professorship at a prestigious college to his wife Kate saw the their cosy nuclear family, also consisting of son Wesley and daughter Olive (13 and 9 respectively) move from California to Vermont for a year of what they all naively expect will be vibrant country living.
Miles knows he has yet to finish his 12-year-old and counting dissertation and he promises himself that this will happen in the bucolic surrounds of New England.
It’s the last puzzle piece of a life which is otherwise full to the brim, with the devoted husband, doing father and owner of Giuseppe, a dog who loves to dig and who decides that rather than troubling the ground outside he will launch into the floor of the house they are renting for nothing from one Norbert Rumphius, is confident his life will find a glorious sense of completion in their new rural world.
They reached the boy in the misty cone beneath the porch light. The dog was soaked, his nose covered with dirt, his hair covered with dirt, his tongue lolling and covered with dirt; he looked as if he had burrowed deep underground. Olive dropped down to hug him; Kate though, Oh, pajamas; and Giuseppe tugged and paced in circles, in and out of the hands that held him, snorting, grinning, truly grinning, as if he knew a thousand secrets, but couldn’t, wouldn’t tell.
But Miles is a man, like his arcana-loving son, who loves the thrill of the new, of learning and finding new and thrilling things too learn and love in life.
Kate describes him as possessing “a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere” and time and again that is borne out as Miles meets odd and interesting people who believe, chiefly, that a man called Jeremiah Wilkes found a hidden inner world, accessible by caves in the local area, in which lives princesses and pterodactyls and all manner of animals and human civilisation now lost to the surface, or outer world.
It’s the stuff of fantasy of course, and Miles knows this, but he finds comfort with the idiosyncratic array of oddball characters who people his daily life and the monthly meetings of the society devoted to Wylkes.
It’s a sense of community and friendship that has long eluded him, and while he isn’t convinced that people who become an unexpected found family aren’t just a little bit mad, he’s happy to know people like Andrei, who gave up biochemistry for scything ands fruit tree tending and Ghost Wesley, an older gentlemen who lives in a sophisticated wheelchair and who photographs snowflakes when he’s not trying too disprove an impressive 18-folders worth of well-worn and much-believed urban myths.
As time goes on, and the family settles into their new country idyll, with Wesley demonstrating a budding love for journalism, Olive adoring art and performing and Kate discovering her new students actually want to learn about Blake and other writers semi-scorned by those back in California, Miles begins to wonder whether the purpose he is seeking might be something altogether different to what he was expecting it to be.
His dissertation lacks focus and coherency and if he’s honest, any sort of underlying passion to get it finished, and perhaps he isn’t as in love with Russian folklore as he thought?
Perhaps his calling lies elsewhere but where exactly? He’s fairly sure it’s not in Wylkes, who might have given Miles a bunch of eccentrically lovely friends but who seems to be quite mad, tantalising and intriguing those his stories are, but maybe it’s in helping out with the staging of his daughter’s school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (they do the same Shakespeare play every year though the school community pretends they will choose another; they never do).
Country People is full of these affectionately funny small observances with Mason imbuing Daniel and his close-knit, skiing-loving family with an almost old-fashioned curiosity about the world around them and a sense that the sorts of things the world around them scorns are the very things that bring them joy.
A celebration of the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies that makes us fully and rounded human, and how just because we’re not like everyone else, doesn’t mean we’re weird or our lives are strange, Country People comes with a glorious reassurance that being odd and unusual is actually one of the best things you can be.
It was only later, as they lay in the dark, when she had whispered it was good to have him back, that he wondered if it might be a good time to explain, if not the secret meeting at the Mountain Catch, then his plan with Andrei, the following morning, to go spelunking.
Life in Vermont (which comes with the possibility of being a permanent, rather than transitory, thing) also gives Miles a sense of where his life might lead next.
While his life was good in many ways back in California as he might up outlandish bedtime stories for his kids and took an active interest in the life of his wife who is fiercely intelligent and in remission from MS, he realises once he gets to the quieter surrounds of Vermont that he lies any sense of real, deep-down happiness and satisfaction.
He finds some temporarily In mastering skiing and scything with Andrei, but long-lasting happiness, beyond his lovely family, eludes him, and it’s only when he becomes more closely involved at Olive’s school that he begins to discern a way forward.
Like everything else in this gorgeously written book, full of prose which sings but which feels eminently warm and human and softly humourously grounded, Miles’ path to existential enlightenment is a quietly nuanced one, not marked by epic narrative points (though the book does have one and it’s transformative for the whole family) but, like many things in life, by a slow connecting of the dots where meaning is hidden in the everyday, small “l” moments of life.
A masterful writer, Mason’s writing is in full glorious flow in Country People, awash with insight and thoughtfulness, big emotions in richly nuanced but humorously observant passages; it is a novel that covers a lot of ground but in ways that allows you to journey along with the family, experience things as they do and come to a point where, like Miles, you realise that though it is easy to become lost in life, it is also possible to become found again and the how of it all might just surprise you as it does our humbly, sweet and beautifully human protagonist.