Is the significance that it is another ghost that resides in the house?
Lillian noticed the catamount was missing when she went into the room. That must have been when the cat was out attacking Harlan. Was the cat protecting Lillian? It seems so, but why, considering it was her father who killed the cat and put it up on the wall.
I’m winding my way through past posts and finding I want to comment here and there, points of agreement and disagreement. I’ve had a new roof and gutters put on my house; four days of relentless ripping apart and pounding back in place. I’m somewhat brain-dead so bear with me.
I’m another who loved the book though not at first: I easily put the book aside and picked it up again two or three days later. I hadn’t expected the short story format. However:
Which of its residents (permanent or temporary) would you have liked to spend more time with?
I liked the young girl who ran away from the Puritan settlement and the woman she became. She survived the death of her husband and then the death of a second husband (Native American). She kindly took in the young captive and her baby when they ended up at her house. Call her a good example of a survivor, one without prejudice or bitterness. Yet when she recognized evil she stepped up to prevent it, at the cost of her life.
I like Helen, sister to the schizophrenic brother. She had moved away from home but she retained a patience and kindness toward her troubled sibling. I also enjoyed her link with the past through Nash’s poetry, though she has no clue of its connection to her family home.
I like Nora - last chapter. I realized something was amiss but I’m pleased her afterlife seems a comfort.
I’ll agree with comments calling the book dark, but I didn’t find it overly violent. Stuff happens, but much of it is “off screen.” The moment “dark” hit for me isn’t a particularly violent moment but rather when I-forget-his-name’s caretaker buries his letters to Nash and circumvent’s Nash’s reappearance in his life. (I’m pleased the men got to cavort in the afterlife. Psalmody 
who knew? In truth, an amusing play on words. Actually an amusing section overall.)
More later.
I didn’t love the book. I came to like it better towards the end. I am glad that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t love it. I was afraid that I was missing something.
We were at our lake house for the last two weeks and I read it at night after my DDs and grandkids went to bed. I was exhausted every night, so I think I missed some things.
I can’t decide whether I would read any other of the author’s books. This was so different.
I didn’t dwell on the poetry between chapters. Actually, I skipped over it. My bad.
The book was beautifully written. I would love to visit the place, if it existed. I was very sad about the apple orchard. So much work went into it. That was the saddest part for me. So much work went into creating that variety of apple. The apple orchard was as fleeting as the humans who once lived in the house.
I would give the book a 3 star.
I read this book this winter. Sometimes I will reread a book for this or my other book club**… but opted not to for this one. It was Ok, but much of it was a tough slog. Having grown up in that part of the country, I did find some of the scenery interesting.
** Full admission: Sometimes when it is my turn to pick a book for my other book club I’ll choose a CC book club title because the links and comment are helpful resource. And I do reread.
@Colorado_mom : I’m in three book clubs. If I’ve read a great book – either on my own or for one of the clubs – I’ll recommend it to the other book clubs. Sometimes I read these books three or four times.
I’ve decided to be less generous in recommending books, because I want to read new stuff, not reread old stuff.
I found this linked discussion on the book where the group was answering the question about the significance of the catamount. Here is part of what they said with the link following.
Someone named ABeman:
“The catamount is also representative of something that has been rendered extinct by human negligence. It represents something wild that has been lost. It also represents the fear of the unknown. This book’s catamount has a big, multifaceted role to fill.”
This is definitely not in The Glass Room category for me. I loved your review. I recognize that North Woods is beautifully written and brilliantly structured, but I feel it gives a bleak view of human nature and our future. So many characters are self-absorbed and downright randy (men, women and beetles alike) and there’s a hint in the final chapters that humans face an apocalypse of their own making.
Helen and Nora were “nice” and that helped, but for me, only the Puritan woman–gone after the second chapter–had heroic qualities.
I didn’t quite understand the abilities of the ghosts – it seems they take physical form to murder intruders, steal roadsters, and install windows and siding. I couldn’t quite buy into that (but I’m trying).
I didn’t notice that! But I was hyper-aware that the weather had almost as much power and personality as the house – often impeding each successive traveler’s journey to the house.
Exactly! I’m a cover person and I actually bought the book – but kept thinking how off-putting the drawing was. There is something part-animal, part-human, part-naked about the catamount – like a mythical creature more than a real animal. Of course, in hindsight, it’s the perfect illustration for the novel.
@Wjs1107, I loved your summary. It helped break open the book for me – I’m seeing things I didn’t before.
How appropriate … sometimes even our own houses take on a life of their own!
From the NYT review @Mary13 linked above:
“North Woods” is a hodgepodge narrative, brazenly disjointed in time, perspective and form. Letters, poems and song lyrics, diary entries, medical case notes, real-estate listings, vintage botanical illustrations, pages of an almanac, modern-day nature photographs, a true-crime detective story, an address to a historical society: Mason stuffs all this (and more!) into his bulging scrapbook of a novel.
This 
One of the two things that captured my attention. (Loved the true-crime detective story.) The other thing that captured my attention: all the subtle links between present and past - truly subtle. Example: Helen, I believe, finds a button in a gap in the kitchen floor; that button popped off the clairvoyant’s dress in the midst of a dalliance with Helen’s grandfather.
Once I started paying attention, I moved from merely liking the book to loving it. I watched for those links.
I agree with @CBBBlinker:
When I finish a book I don’t often feel as if I’d gain a lot if I read it again – but in this case I do. (I’m not sure I will actually reread it, but it would be worthwhile.)
I felt I entered a collaboration with the author. I adjusted how I read to match North Woods. I watched for details linking past to present. It isn’t a book built for speed.
Should I have adjusted to meet the author? Maybe/maybe not. I know I got more out of the book by doing so. My three star rating slid to five. Would I recommend the book to my book club? Nope. And I’m truly interested in what happened at @buenavista’s book discussion.
The button! I knew that had significance, but couldn’t remember which of the preceding chapters it appeared in.
I had some trouble tracking the inhabitants of the house and their relationship to one another. I made a timeline of the chapters, which might be helpful for those who read the book a while ago. If not helpful, just skip over the posts below. I am breaking it up into three posts.
Chapter One – Puritan woman and her lover flee their community, running through an Eden-like forest, until they lay a stone at the foundation of the home they will build, “At the brook, he found a wide, flat stone, pried it from the earth, and carried it back into the clearing, where he laid it gently in the soil. Here.”
“The ‘Nightmaids’ Letter.” The letter begins as a captivity tale that describes a murderous rampage by “heathens” and the kidnapping of a woman and her baby. (Captivity Tales will appear in a later chapter.) The captor leaves her at a “hut of log and stone” with an old woman “dressed in skirts and blankets like an Indian, but her face was English and she spoke both English and the heathen’s tongue.” This is the Puritan woman of the first chapter, now twice-widowed. Three English Scouts with bad intentions arrive on the scene. She poisons them, they shoot her. The captive woman buries all three bodies and departs with her baby.
Chapter Two – A description of the germination of the apple seed from the stomach of one of the dead scouts–simultaneously poetic and gruesome. In the end, “in the place that was once the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman, one of the apple seeds, sheltered in the shattered rib cage, breaks its coat, drops a root into the soil, and lifts a pair of pale-green cotyledons.”
Charles Osgood’s letter to his daughters, Alice and Mary, about his life’s work – the discovery and nurturing of the Osgood Wonder apple (which began from the seed in the stomach of the scout). Osgood is considered mad by his family. His apple orchard grows from a vision, a dream of an apple being handed to him from “the tree that fed the souls.” Osgood expands the log and stone cabin by connecting a two-story home, which he paints lemon yellow. He plants an elm tree. He dies in the Revolutionary War.
Chapter Three – The story of twin sisters (sweet) Alice and (stern) Mary Osgood, from young adults to death at age sixty. Mary is possessive of Alice, a possessiveness that gradually veers toward madness, leading her to kill Alice with an axe after she sleeps with George Carter. As a boy, George had led Charles Osgood to the apple tree. Mary buries Alice beneath the floorboards and crawls in beside her, to die there as well.
A page from the Farmers Almanac (I think), followed by “a song for voice and fife” about a catamount who stalks (Alice and Mary’s) sheep, enters the yellow house with “the smell of Death” and roams the rooms, dragging in its kills and leaving behind a bloodied pile of bones. (Amusingly – and this is typical of Mason’s dark humor – the song is sung “to the tune of ‘Cheerily and Merrily.’”)
The song is followed by a description of the countless seeds brought to North America via a ship from the Isle of Wight. The seeds of these many plants “nestle in among the native grasses” and grow undisturbed around the yellow house.
Chapter Four – Pre-Civil War. Bounty hunter Phalen tracks escaped slave Esther and her baby to the yellow house. He is given directions by a girl selling a “Ghost apple” – clearly one of Osgood’s Wonder apples. During his search, Phalen pulls up a floorboard, where he is met with the ax-wielding ghost Mary, who promptly dispatches him with the words “I don’t believe our guest invited you.”
Song about a squirrel’s hoard of chestnuts. The squirrel is killed by an owl, but his buried stash will “burst their husks and grow” into chestnut trees.
The song is followed by the painter William Teale’s letters to the writer Erasmus Nash – letters that become increasingly romantic and culminate in a love affair. Teale is the new occupant of the yellow house. He cleans out the sheep’s bones and other Osgood detritus and builds on another wing for his family. Teale writes to Nash about the intense lure of the forest, “Woods, from the Old English wode…also meaning ‘mad’.”
Chapter Five – The nurse for the aging painter William Teale recounts her growing love for her patient and the guilt she feels for withholding a letter from his true love Erasmus Nash. She digs a hole in the ground and whispers her secret into the earth (whispers that Robert S. will hear later in his “madness”).
Another song by Mary and Alice Osgood about the way winter entraps all things, “as even sunlight turns to ice / While time itself goes quietly still.”
Chapter Six – Early 1900’s. The house is now owned by Mr. and Mrs. Farnsworth. Mr. Farnsworth has purchased the property from the Teale heirs because he recognizes it as Eden – “I knew it the moment I saw it.” He kicks out the old nurse still living there, but lets her take Teale’s paintings (which will turn up in a later chapter). He plans to turn it into a commercial lodge. His wife is hearing ghosts in the house – specifically, the lovemaking between William Teale and Erasmus Nash. Mr. Farnsworth hires a charlatan spiritualist to cleanse the house and she gets more than she bargained for at the séance table.
Chapter Seven – We are now 100 years past the deaths of Alice and Mary Osgood, the land transformed by time with tall trees from the seeds scattering in earlier chapters. We follow a spore that brings a blight to the chestnut trees.
“Case Notes on Robert S.” - the journal of a lobotomist whose patient is Robert S., (the grandson of the Farnsworths in the séance chapter). Robert has auditory and visual hallucinations that cause him great anxiety. The other-worldly creatures who haunt him range from benevolent to horrendously cruel. He hears voices coming out of the earth. He is diagnosed with schizophrenia … but we know better. The doctor pays a (yellow) house call to Robert and his mother Lillian, and while there, his sky blue roadster disappears, and so does Robert.
Chapter Eight – We again follow spores – these ones carried by beetles, on a path to destroy the elms. The spores’ successful travels to the trees around the yellow house and are courtesy of two sets of lovers, a human honeymoon pair and a beetle couple.
Chapter Nine – Robert’s mother, Lillian Farnsworth S., now an elderly woman, is still living in the very rundown yellow house, struggling with the onset of dementia. Through a prison pen-pal program, she believes she has found her long lost son, Robert, but she is the victim of a con. We are left with Lillian waiting for his arrival, with she and her dog feeling some powerful supernatural unease.
“Murder Most Cold” is a true-crime potboiler piece. Jack Dunne gets a tip that a body has been found in a tree, journeys to the location and joins forces with the local police. They find the top half of a man frozen in a tree outside the yellow house – a man who turns out to be the very same con artist headed for Lillian. It looks like a catamount attack, although the authorities deem that to be nearly impossible. Nearly.
Chapter Ten – Robert S.’s sister Helen is notified of his death from lung cancer (his earlier disappearance is explained away by a short stint in prison). Helen reluctantly travels back to Oakfield to handle the arrangements. (Helen is an English professor, and on the plane she grades papers about Erasmus Nash, ghosts, painters and seances.) In the yellow house, she finds dozens of film reels, in which Robert tried to film the ghosts who appeared to him, but Helen can only see the forest and its creatures – no spirits.
The opening of a speech (never delivered) by Morris Lakeman to the Historical Society of Western Massachusetts. Inspired by the Nightmaid’s Letter (now a historical document) and an old copy of the “Murder Most Cold” article, he pulls together threads that send him in search of the fourth body described in the letter.
Chapter Eleven – Morris is entranced by the sprawling, abandoned yellow house, and becomes a squatter, searching daily for any evidence with a detector. When he finally believes he has found something and begins to dig, he dies of a massive heart attack – cradled in the arms of the ghost of Alice Osgood.
Musical score about a pair of birds, followed by a poem about May, followed by instructions for ploughing land for planting.
Chapter Twelve – Nora, a botanist headed to the mountains to study of woodland flowers, is killed in a single vehicle crash when swerving to avoid a bear in the road. It takes her a while to understand that she is dead – gently informed by the ghost of Charles Osgood, who picks her up by the side of the road. Osgood takes Nora to the yellow house, where she is awed by the flora surrounding it.
“Succession” - Nora stays in the yellow house, living with fellow ghosts, and watches people come and go through the centuries, including a young woman “who comes one spring carrying a thumb drive onto which she’s transferred reels of film belonging to a great-great-grandmother she never knew” (Helen). The occupants change, the seasons change, the landscape changes, and there is the suggestion of an apocalypse that reduces the human population. Finally, one day, in a dry October, a forest fire claims what remains of the yellow house and all the foliage around it. “It takes two hours, and the house is gone. For a moment, a stillness hangs over the rubble, and then it all begins again.”
Wow @Mary13 — such a masterful recap!
Wow! This was a great review of all that happened. And there was certainly a lot. And helps one understand the interconnectedness that I missed some of because I put it down several times intending not to finish it. I usually don’t continue reading books once ghosts appear, but I ended up making an exception for this one.
@Mary13 Thanks you for this awesome summary. Brilliant!!!
@Mary13 standing ovation from this corner, that is truly amazing synopsis of a challenging storyline.
Kudos and thank you, it helped me tie together some things.
Also, @Wjs1107 many thanks for your summary and insight!!
And, to others who weighed in about the catamount with their views and for those links !
Again, @Mary13 well done 
@mary13 you mentioned how book covers reveal much to you.
“ “The idea for North Woods came to me during an autumn in New England, where I was very much inspired by the textures and history of its woods,” Mason added.
Anna’s different covers captured this world from her very first drafts. There were gorgeous Hudson River scenes, strangely gothic colonial portraits, whimsical old owls, scarcely-clad (and not-clad-at-all) torsos, knotted trees, a whirling collage of neon axes, a tumble of of apples, and a near-favorite, a gritty old print of Adam and Eve in Eden, in the colors of all old television on the fritz. Anna had even managed to capture the sense of the story’s evolution over time and across the seasons during which it was written. And yet very early the image of a catamount stood out. There was something to the cover’s panther that was evocative of the creature who roams the book: its beauty and danger, and even—how to put this?—a kind of bemused, wise confidence. It is hard to know whether it is about to wreak havoc, or stretch out for a nap.
My favorite covers are ones that both catch the eye, but also reveal more of themselves on closer inspection. Anna’s catamount was one that I return to; I’ve come to love its strange gaze, the imperfect, slightly awkward rendering of one of its legs, and the vegetation beneathv it that suggests, in its strange forms, an entire forest, as if it looms over both the woods she once haunted, and the story that follows.”
@mary13 summary of Northwoods is so helpful,
I found the lack of dates annoying, and jarring at first, but then I used clues to pinpoint approximate era.
Just saw this- to add to timeline discussion
From a blog post :
The timeline through the novel is both chronological and seasonal. Here I try to estimate the chronological timeline.
Late 1600s: two young lovers build a cabin
Near 1700: 3 English scouts axed to death and woman shot, all buried, one had recently eaten an apple that grows into a tree over time
Mid-1700s: Charles Osgood comes upon apple tree and expands house
1775: Charles heads off to Revolutionary War
1776: Charles dies
1816: Alice and Mary start raising sheep and shortly thereafter Mary kills Alice
1820s: Mary dies and shortly thereafter Catamount kills Osgood sheep
1825ish: Phalen hunts Esther
Squirrel killed by owl
Mid-19th century: WHT from the Hudson River School art movement writes to poet named Nash with an erotic charge. Nurse Ana cares for WHT in his decline
Late-19th century: Karl Farnsworth sees the place as a hunting lodge and Anastasia leads séance for Farnsworth’s
1910 or so: spore causing chestnut tree blight lands in tree by house
1940 or so: Doctor assesses Robert for a lobotomy
1950s: Lilian writes to penpals at state prison
1977: Robert dies and Helen comes to house, finds Robert’s films
1984: Morris Lakeman banned from giving address to historical society of Western Massachusetts
Present day: Nora flips her car driving to yellow house
Thank you, thank you, thank you, @Mary13 ! Your brilliant synopsis is helping me tie so many loose ends. I confess I rushed through this book because I got a hold of it rather late, and if there was ever a book that needed unhurried contemplation it was this one. I am rereading parts of it, and liking it much more during this second round.