North Woods

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1-Interlude 2

Chapter 3-Interlude 5

Interlude 6-Chapter 7

Interlude 8-Chapter 10

Interludes 10-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Apples

A recurring motif in the novel, apples have long been associated with the Garden of Eden and relate to the novel’s theme of Paradise Lost. The fruit first appears as a source of temptation when one of the Puritan scouts offers a slice to the captive girl. She’s quick to understand the allusion. “And I laughd, and said, Who am I, Eve?” (16). A seed from that same apple, within a buried scout’s rotting corpse, later germinates into the first tree bearing the Osgood Wonder apple. The apple in question may symbolize paradise but fails to offer anything positive to either the scout or the girl.

Osgood’s lifelong obsession with apples begins when he’s bayonetted by a French soldier. The soldier was coring an apple at the time, and the fruit was skewered by his bayonet, preventing the weapon from fully penetrating Osgood’s body. Again, the apple holds a seductive promise. Osgood interprets it as the hand of providence at work to spare his life. Later, the Osgood Wonder apple becomes Alice’s undoing after a neighbor uses the fruit to make hard cider and, when she becomes tipsy, seduces her. Unlike the captive girl, Alice is tempted by the apple, and she pays for this indiscretion with her life when Mary kills her.

Later generations of inhabitants in the north woods discard the apple completely. Farnsworth removes part of the orchard to build a croquet lawn. This precipitates a ghostly visit by Osgood demanding to know what became of his apple trees. By the novel’s end, the orchard has been completely eradicated, implying that this particular slice of paradise has been irrevocably lost.

Ghosts

Ghosts repeatedly make their presence known as they intrude into the world of the novel’s living characters. As a recurring motif related to voices from the past, they speak to the theme of The Narrative Puzzle. The novel’s many different segments span multiple centuries of human experience in the north woods. However, the people who enter and exit the woods are generally oblivious to those who came before them. Every attempt to create a coherent story is interrupted when those on the brink of understanding the big picture are killed or die before they can communicate their message.

The real repositories of knowledge are the ghosts. Now incorporeal, they can review not merely their own lives but the context of those lives within the sweep of the land’s history. Teale and Nash appear in the yellow house long after their deaths. In the book’s final pages, 21st-century Nora meets mid-19th-century Teale as he paints a landscape in the woods. Osgood died in 1776 but reproaches early 20th-century Farnsworth for destroying his apple orchard.

During the mid-20th century, Robert is able to communicate with all the departed spirits who once lived in the north woods. However, his apparently unstable mental condition makes it hard to convey everything he has discovered to those who are considered sane by comparison. Helen is unable to see the ghosts that Robert captured in his videos, and she remains ignorant of the overall story of the woods even after she bequeaths the films to her descendants. Thus, the full story of the north woods remains known only to the region’s ghosts and one corporeal human whose testimony everyone discredits.

The Catamount

The figure of the catamount, or mountain lion, is a recurring motif. She represents unspoiled nature and relates to the theme of The Land as Silent Witness. Her changing fate over the course of the novel speaks volumes about the destruction wrought by humans over the centuries. Initially, the catamount emerges as an apex predator in the region when the Puritans first arrive, and she hunts freely because prey is plentiful. She features most prominently in the ballad that the deceased Osgood sisters compose when the animal preys on the sheep that Mary sets loose shortly before her death. The catamount, fearing that a nearby wolf might steal her kill, drags it into the yellow house and makes herself at home there for a time before returning to the wild.

The outlook for the catamount species isn’t as rosy a century later. When Farnsworth buys the land in the early 20th century, he’s intent on offering his guests at the newly christened Catamount Lodge the opportunity to wipe out the remaining mountain lion population for sport. However, both the lodge and its namesake fail to thrive. By the time Lillian’s would-be attacker is killed by a mountain lion, local wildlife experts are unwilling to believe the catamount is the culprit because the species has disappeared entirely from the region. In one final attempt to evoke the romance of an earlier era, the newly renovated yellow house is rechristened Catamount Acres in the late 20th century. By then, the big cats and much of the other flora and fauna of the north woods are gone.