Miles’s meeting with Andrei in his orchard satirizes the urbanite fantasy of authentic rural labor. In his search for a country friend, Miles hopes to find a modern-day Russian peasant, an embodiment of the agrarian ideal he has studied in Tolstoy. Instead, he finds a lapsed biochemist meticulously picking larvae from trees, one who “[can’t] even think of a single folktale,” but “apples, […] apples he could help with” (111). However, Andrei’s confidence—which Miles initially finds comfort in—is undermined by his actual failure in farming, something that only reinforces Miles’s lacking sense of identity. This scene dismantles The Romanticization of Rural Life by revealing its constructed nature. Andrei’s devotion to scything is a genuine attempt to cure his modern intellectual despair, but his success as an apple grower is a complete fiction, secretly manufactured by his wife, Paloma, with industrial chemicals that ideologically oppose the lifestyle he yearns to lead. Paloma’s pragmatic deception, which allows Andrei to perform the role of the organic farmer for his friends and family, emphasizes the novel’s satirical argument: The “authentic” country life sought by transplants is often a carefully maintained performance, hiding the complex realities of both nature and human psychology.

The memorable local figures whom Miles encounters—the Rat Man, Kayleigh Swan, and Snowflake Bentley—establish a pattern where community identity is built through elaborate and eccentric personal mythologies. Even Miranda, who attempts to legitimize her interest in these local stories by publishing numerous academic papers about them, is known to Miles and Kate for her frequent, detailed stories about the townspeople. These characters engage in constant, imaginative self-creation, with tales similar to what Miles studies in Russian folklore. Miles’s inability to recognize the same storytelling impulse around him results in him avoiding his dissertation only to surround himself with similar folktales, creating an overarching irony in the narrative. This focus on personal narrative highlights the theme of Finding Purpose and Community Through Storytelling. The town’s social fabric is defined by the circulation of and participation in these strange, compelling, and highly individualized stories.

Miles’s immersion in the physical activities of scything and skiing provides him with a temporary alternative to his stalled intellectual life. Scything offers Miles a direct connection to the world of his dissertation, allowing him to experience a famous scene from Anna Karenina rather than merely analyze it. In doing so, he realizes that he’d incorrectly interpreted the scene, which has no higher, abstract meaning; instead, “the scything scene [i]s about scything” (115). He goes on to describe the numerous sensory details from the scene, aligning with his new friend. For Andrei, the act is therapeutic, a way of Searching for Meaning in the Modern World through rhythmic, purposeful labor that contrasts with the abstract frustrations of his former scientific career. This passage demonstrates how Miles’s search for fulfillment through higher meaning is misguided. Instead, he’s learning to find satisfaction in simple, physical things that help alleviate his cyclical, critical introspection. 

He struggles not to intellectualize the act of scything, as he instantly wonders if he should switch his dissertation topic to scythes. Instead, he chooses not to return to the dissertation at all, as “[w]riting about [scything] seem[s] to break the spell, and by now he kn[ows] he’d choose the spell over the paragraph” (117). This line serves the dual purpose of reinforcing the genuine benefit of the physical action, which also allows him to develop a friendship, and raising the question of whether Miles earnestly believes in the power of these acts or is merely avoiding his work. Nonetheless, these activities continue to provide him with joy and connection to others, like when he learns to skate ski from his daughter, Olive. His struggle to learn from videos and verbal instructions gives way to a breakthrough achieved by simply mirroring his child’s movements. Both pursuits offer a form of mastery that is physical and intuitive, providing an antidote to the anxieties of their professional and academic lives, which are defined by abstract thought and intellectual impasse.

Giuseppe’s obsessive digging introduces a subterranean mystery that parallels Miles’s own intellectual and psychological state. The dog’s relentless excavation, which begins as a nuisance and culminates in a hole through the living-room floor, functions as the symbol of Giuseppe’s digging. It mirrors the invisible “Super-Rat-Line” described by the Rat Man, suggesting that a hidden world of instinct and ancient pathways exists just beneath the surface of the family’s domestic life. This digging externalizes the internal pressures of the household: Miles’s stalled dissertation, his growing sense of purposelessness, and the unspoken tensions in his marriage. When Miles dwells on his frustration with his dissertation, he pointedly describes his malcontent as going “[d]own, down. Deeper, deeper!” rather than growing larger or taller (190). Just as Giuseppe is driven by an unseen force to break through the floor, Miles is driven by his own quiet desperation to break out of his confinement, a quest that ultimately leads him to the Jeremiah Wylkes Society and its own promise of a hidden world.

The anonymous postcard inviting Miles to a meeting of the Society marks his transition from a foreigner to Vermont and passive observer of rural life to a potential participant, with access to the town’s secrets. His drive to the meeting—a journey into the contested borderlands of Massachusetts, culminating in two flat tires outside a derelict diner—is framed as a classic descent into a mysterious underworld. The Jeremiah Wylkes Society and the hollow-Earth theory are rooted in the real historical context of 19th-century speculative geography. The reveal that the society’s members are a cross-section of the entire community—from the pragmatic land-conservancy director to the eccentric Snowflake Bentley—demonstrates that the town’s most outlandish belief holds relevance to them all. This implies that there may be truth to the theory, whether literal or metaphorical, that resonates with each member. For Miles, who has been searching for the authentic “country people” of his academic fantasies, the discovery suggests that the true folklore of the region isn’t a relic of the past but a living, collaborative narrative being written in the present.