Into the wild: Country People, by Daniel Mason, reviewed
From our UK edition
In his mid-forties, Miles Krzelewski is a graduate student who makes Saul Bellow’s Herzog look like an academic overachiever. After 14 years and 11 changes of subject – including Rabelais’s monsters, Chekhov’s early humour and Tolstoy’s train journeys and farming techniques – he has yet to complete his doctoral thesis. When his wife, Kate, a respected Milton and Blake scholar, is offered a one-year visiting professorship at a rural Vermont college, Miles is thrilled, convinced that a pastoral life will afford him the inspiration he needs for his latest project – a study of Russian peasant folklore. Together with their children, 12-year-old Wesley and nine-year-old Olive, plus their dog, Giuseppe, they undertake the long journey from their Californian home.
