COUNTRY PEOPLE

A California family is transplanted to rural Vermont.

For as long as urbanites have been decamping to the countryside, there have been satires of their antics; recent standouts include Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends (2021) and Brian Schaefer’s Town & Country (2025). Now the author of The Piano Tuner (2002) and The Winter Soldier (2018), known for his richly imagined historical fiction, serves up his own contribution to the genre. Miles Krzelewski-Petrosian has been at work on his Ph.D. dissertation for 14 years, cycling through subjects such as Tolstoy’s peasants and Russian folktales. His more successful wife, Kate, a Milton and Blake specialist, has been offered a one-year visiting professorship at a prestigious Vermont college, so this family of “simple city people”—son Wesley, age 12; daughter Olive, 9; and dog Giuseppe—leave for fictional Greensbury. There they’ll housesit for an economics professor on sabbatical, with instructions to “watch for leaks, to keep the animals away.” Not unlike Miles with his dissertation, the author meanders through a series of eccentric character sketches and humorous episodes, including a snowflake photographer who gets around on a motorized scooter and a radio call-in show, The Miscellaneous Minute, whose daily themes are continually scuttled by callers. It’s funny if a bit aimless; the novel clicks into gear when Miles is invited, via an anonymous postcard, to attend a secret meeting of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society, named for a 19th-century pastor believed to have discovered a glorious underground kingdom after wandering deep into a local cave. Can this misfit group, bursting with historical research and oddball theories, locate the storied portal? At last, we’re in the uncanny terrain of Mason’s previous novel, North Woods (2023), where the supernatural brushes up against the natural world, reminding us that we’re not so far removed from the superstitions of our forebears.

A cosmic riddle underlies this mischievous comic ramble.