Life is brutal, short, and ridiculous, and that's why I read what I read

“Country People” by Daniel Mason is nothing like his earlier work, “The Winter Soldier.”

Or is it?

“The Winter Soldier” portrays fresh young Viennese medical student Lucius Krzelewski is sent to an abandoned first-aid station in the Austria-Hungarian Empire during World War One. He goes, urged on by his family, owners of a mining company set to strike it rich in the war. Lucius K finds that this war is brutal and he learns everything that war teaches: life is brutal, short, and pointless. He finds love but at a cost. It’s a harrowing historical novel, not easily forgotten. And humorous, too. Funny in the same way that Juroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk finds his own role in the same war for the same decrepit empire. 

In “Country People,” the thoroughly-modern Krzelewski-Petrosian family move with their two children from urban southern California to rural Vermont. The wife has been hired for a teaching position at a small liberal arts college. Her husband is rootless, still trying to decide on the focus of his PhD dissertation based on Leo Tolstoy’s portrayals of the country people at his rural outpost in Russia. Miles feels that moving from urban southern California to rural Vermont will help him understand country people, rural people, people of the soil.

He is in for some rude, rollicking, surprises.

It’s an old plot line. Take people out of their home environment and move them to a foreign place. See what happens. Many such tales end in break-ups, family dissolution, heartache, death.

This is not the reader's destination. All are threatened but most are resolved in quirky, creative ways. I expect nothing less from this author.  

Mason is always full of surprises. He is a fantastic writer. Amor Towles is great at this, witness "A Gentleman in Moscow." Jerome Charyn is too, as is Grace Paley. I keep her "The Little Disturbances of Man" collection handy at all times. 

Mason's humor really shines in "Country People." It prompts laughs but also a sense of sadness at how people are so accomplished at misunderstanding what is happening in their own lives.

After I read "Country People," I returned to reviews of Mason's 2018 war novel. I discovered that Lucius, the book's main character, has the last name of Krzelewski.

Here's what became obvious to me as I read. In Nancy Pearl's "Four Doors to Reading," she cites the main things we look for in a book: Story, setting, character, language. It's like winning the lottery when you get all four. But at least one of these lure us into the next book. They are all important. But what I look for in a book is writing style. Do I want to be in a conversation with this author for 400 pages? So maybe that means language or possibly story. Or all four.

I have to go back to my early reading. I loved the comics in daily newspapers. Little short stories and lots of humor. I picked up my father's Bill Mauldin books and laughed at Willie and Joe. But it wasn't only humor. I loved a good story, especially the tales of the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. I read sci-fi and Admiral Horatio Hornblower sailing adventures, pirate tales, and books about the second great war of the 20th century, the one in which our fathers whipped the bad guys. I picked out a book from my father's library, "A Sub-Treasury of American Humor." I read Mark Twain and S.J. Perelman and Ring Lardner and Dorothy Parker. There was something magical in the way they wrote. I didn't get it all but I got enough to take me to "Catch-22" and "Slaughterhouse-Five" in my high school years. Some of Heller's scenes cracked me up. I really had no grasp of war's brutality but could see that writers tackled big subjects that were both funny and sad.

I am a fan of satire and the absurd. I also am a fan of stories with happy endings. Can you call "Country People" a story with a happy ending? The reader will have to decide.  

I crave style in novel, short stories, and in my life, the boring days of an old man. I seek ways to spend Florida's endless, sun-drenched days. Miles Krzelewski-Petrosian is a ridiculous man, a character who misundertands almost everything that is happening around him. For all of that, he leads a wonderful life after all. I love him for that.