In Country People, Daniel Mason satirizes the tendency of urbanites to project idealized fantasies onto rural life, a vision that’s consistently undermined by the complex realities of the Vermont countryside. The Krzelewski-Petrosian family arrives with a set of romantic preconceptions shaped by literature and a desire for authenticity, but their experiences reveal a world far messier, more eccentric, and more economically precarious than they imagined. Mason’s critique is double edged: While it pokes fun at the family’s naivete, it also uses their outsider perspective to expose how the performance of rural simplicity, both by locals and online influencers, is its own form of modern artifice.

The most prominent fantasy is that of a return to the land, embodied by Miles’s dream of becoming a Tolstoyan farmer. Inspired by the pastoral scenes in Anna Karenina, he imagines a life of wholesome, self-sufficient labor. This ideal quickly collides with reality through his friendship with Andrei, a fellow academic-turned-farmer. Andrei’s orchard isn’t a bucolic paradise, as he spends much of his time battling a litany of pests. Furthermore, Miles learns that a hired arborist and a host of powerful chemicals secretly sustain Andrei’s supposedly organic harvest. The fantasy is further dismantled by Miles’s own attempt at pre-industrial labor—scything—which leaves him with back pain rather than spiritual enlightenment; additionally, while he finds it to be a welcome diversion, he discovers when scything season is over that it hasn’t actually improved his connection to his environment. He notes how “just because you scythe well with a man does not mean that you will have much to talk about when the scything’s over” (189), demonstrating how this symbol of rural life does little to actually enmesh him in the rural lifestyle or community. This gap between the literary ideal and the laborious, often misleading reality of modern farming highlights the deep disconnect at the heart of the family’s rural dream.

The novel also parodies the commodification of this rural fantasy through the character of Candace Flaherty, the influencer behind the popular homesteading blog Farm Candy. Candace projects an image of single-mother grit and agricultural competence, teaching her followers how to bake, farm, and perform home repairs. In reality, she’s a transplant from Greenwich, Connecticut, who “c[a]n’t grow a thing [and] c[a]n’t fix a thing” and whose farm and home are a “disaster” (141). Her success is built on a carefully curated performance of authenticity for an online audience hungry for the very fantasy that the Krzelewski-Petrosians initially hold. She also utilizes her sexuality to appeal to largely male viewers, adding another layer of insincerity and false allure to the idea of homesteading. 

By exposing this fraudulence, Mason suggests that the romanticized “country” is often a product to be sold or a narrative to be consumed rather than a place to be truly lived in. When Miles is offered a job as a third-grade teacher at the novel’s end, the principal tells him how several teachers were leaving due to being priced out, as so many people bought second homes during the pandemic: “[T]his is what they had come to, she said, her voice rising, homes for the out-of-towners, while the locals lived in motels” (189). This closing detail about rural life emphasizes how bucolic fantasies are commodified and often harm the real people leading these lifestyles, leaving this conflict over authenticity unresolved. For Miles, however, he and his family achieve this by engaging with their town as it is, accepting what isn’t perfect and building a lifestyle they’re genuinely happy with.