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.