The Welcome Return of Charles Frazier

h1 November 12th, 2006 by jules

thirteen-moons.gifWhew. It’s been a while since I’ve posted about an adult title, since I’ve been doing my duty and reading picture book after picture book for the Cybils committee on which I serve. But what a rich title to return to after my little hiatus. Charles Frazier is back after a literary absence just short of ten years (his breathtaking and National Book Award-winning Cold Mountain — for which I have a great fondness, since it’s a nearly perfect and lyrically-written odyssey and since I lifted my daughter’s beautiful name from this grand, lovely piece of writing — was published in ’97). I dare say it’s been more than thirteen moons since we’ve heard from him; and thank goodness he’s returned, because he’s one of our finest contemporary American authors with a distinctive voice and capable of such evocative, unforgettable prose (according to this link at Wikipedia, Frazier was offered an eight million dollar advance for Thirteen Moons, all based on the success of Cold Mountain. Could it be true? Who knows, but if it is true . . . wow).

In this epic novel’s opening, we meet Will Cooper — in his 9th decade of life — who aims to set the record straight, to recount his life in nineteenth-century America as attorney, colonel, “white chief,” and senator:

There is no scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition. I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. We’re called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and a dark way getting there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end. The belief I’ve acquired over a generous and nevertheless inadequate time on earth is that we arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we departed from the world. But, on the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed a journey.

Ah. I like that opening paragraph. I love to read reviews. Give me literary criticism, and I’m a happy camper. I even enjoy user/reader reviews on Amazon. Someone there — under this title — mercilessly mocks that opening line, writing that it’s not believable that a centenarian who’s lived most of his life on the frontier, as the reviewer put it, would speak like that. Faulty argument, but I won’t go further there. I admit I did chuckle at the fervency with which he lambasts the novel (and not condascendingly, mind you; this reader’s great contempt for the novel is just the flip side of a passionate approbation for it, and either one is terribly more interesting than having no opinion at all). But, I like these opening lines. Will Cooper is a singular voice, and he had me wanting more from the novel’s very inception.

Cooper was an orphan and then a bound boy; he was given, at the age of twelve, a horse, a key, and a map, having been deserted, sold off by his aunt and uncle to travel alone through the vast, intimidating wilderness. Off he goes alone to operate a trading post at the edge of the Cherokee Nation, represented by a sprawling white space on his map. Upon arrival, he befriends Bear, a Cherokee elder and chief, and becomes like a son to him over the years, as well as an adopted member of the Cherokee tribe. The novel follows Cooper through the years, serving as historical fiction of sorts (most notably as Cooper crosses paths with such prominent men of history as Davy Crockett, Senator John C. Calhoun, and President Andrew Jackson), as Frazier brings to vivid life the uncharted territories of the, as then, unimpaired land — the novel is set chiefly in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains, but we travel up and down the Mississippi River with Will, across Tennessee, to the bright lights of the rather undercooked and fledgling Washington City (Will serving as self-taught lawyer and then state senator and bringing the Indians’ protestations to the federal government), and more. Eventually, Cooper — based, in part, on the life of frontiersman William Holland Thomas — leads the Cherokee clan as a white chief; he witnesses first-hand the Trail of Tears; and partakes in the Civil War, doing his duty for the Confederacy as a self-anointed colonel, steering a rag-tag group of Indians, lawyers, shop clerks, and bookkeepers as officers. Following his years of advocacy for the Cherokee tribes he considers family, he wanders rather aimlessly through the countryside — in part to avoid paying his many debtors — and pining madly and deeply for his heart’s truest desire, the enigmatic and fiercely independent Claire, whom he, technically, won in a card game at age twelve after first embarking on his journey once being sold as a bound boy (you knew this was coming, right? Who else does desire and longing quite like Charles Frazier? Sure, to be exact, he only does it in one other novel, but oh does he do it well — who can forget Inman staring at the back of Ada’s neck in church? But I digress).

What does not stand out in either of Frazier’s novels is plot. But — arguably, I guess — this is not why we read Frazier. We read his lyrical, descriptive prose for its themes, for his incisive commentary on our modern world by looking back at the pioneering decades of America’s past. Frazier touches upon our undying desire for money, commerce (with Cooper failing to understand the Yankees of his time and their “deep guillibility” in thinking that money was the “engine that wheeled the stars across the night sky”). After stumbling upon a bloody skirmish between the Cherokees and the soldiers chasing them through the wilderness while he was momentarily away, Cooper says, “I’ve never been much of a one for prayer, but I looked at the dead boy and prayed that in the future it would be the likes of Jackson sprawled on the ground and not poor boys with hardly two pennies to rub together dying for the foolish ideas of greedy old men.” And rest assured that Frazier is not giving us the romantically sketched Noble Savage ruthlessly hunted down by the White Man. He writes,

It is tempting to look back at Bear’s people from the perspective of this modern world and see them as changeless and pure, authentic people in ways impossible for anybody to be anymore. We need Noble Savages for our own purposes. Our happy imaginings about them and the pure world they occupied do us good when incoherent change overwhelms us. But even in those early days when I was first getting to know Bear and his people, I could see that change and brutal loss had been all they had experienced for two centuries.

And by writing about such atrocities of history, Frazier hits upon the notion of peace, another of his recurring motifs, it seems: “{E}very path through the world but peace leads to eight kinds of loneliness,” Cooper learns from Bear.

And, then — of course — the aforesaid longing. This is what Frazier writes about so scrupulously. It is woven throughout every fiber of this novel. In the unforgettable scene in which Cooper wins Claire in a card game with Featherstone, a Cherokee with which Cooper eventually develops an infuriatingly complicated relationship, he tells the reader — in the retrospect through which the entire novel is viewed — “{s}omething was sealed. Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.” Only desire trumps time, he writes. When all else leaves us, we have yearning (“{a}nd when I’m dead and in a box in the dark dark ground, and all my various souls have died and I am nothing but insensible bones, something in the marrow will still feel yearning, desire persisting beyond flesh,” Cooper tells us). With this desire as his unintentional guide, Cooper forges ahead. Looking back, he examines the choices made in his life and waxes philosophic on how it all plays out (but not too abstrusely — “most of the time {life} is just one damn thing happening after another, all adding up to confusion.” Socrates he ain’t, but he’s got a point nonetheless).

And, having decided that “pain is the constant drone of life” and that the hardest task is to stay constantly attendant, Cooper ruminates that “if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant . . . Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever. Those are the harsh and contradictory rules Creation has laid down for the game we’re forced to play.” Besides being an engrossing piece of historical fiction, the novel seems a treatise on the question Bear poses to Cooper in the winterhouse where they spent many cold seasons together: “If you’re to die tomorrow, do you spend the time praising Creation or cursing God?” as well as a study on overwhelming change and its effect upon one’s memory (“{w}hen all you know is lost and gone forever, does it become sweeter in the mind? Does it make you want to let go or hold on even tighter? All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren”). Needless to say, the novel’s setting — the nestling, newborn America from the Native American perspective — is precisely the one with which to address what seem to be some of these favorite themes of Frazier’s.

One more thing, and then I’ll shut my word-hole (as this post itself rivals the length of a novella). Speaking of literary criticism, as I did above, Jonathan Yardley wrote a not-so-pleasant review of Thirteen Moons for The Washington Post. With all due respect to his thought-provoking commentary, I have one bone to pick. Yardley writes about Frazier’s “sentimental streak” and then backs off a bit, saying that he at least writes with conviction. Then he attacks again, citing as illustration the ending of Cold Mountain and the somewhat doomed romance of Cooper and Claire (what Yardley calls “sentimentality . . . served up with a hard-hearted twist,” as if to balance out Frazier’s schmaltz — rather, corniness, as he refers to it all). Of all the schloopy-sloshy, goopy and soppy contemporary writers of fiction out there, he’s picking on Charles Frazier? I get his point, but come on (how’s that for some biting, vigorous literary criticism?)! I hardly count writing about the sometimes vast and airy and complicated and intricate landscapes of the human heart sentimental, certainly when it’s done with Frazier’s masterful and assured and meticulous hand. Not to mention that Yardley just joined the ranks of Those Who Moan and Groan About the Ending of Cold Mountain (usually, it’s someone who’s only seen the movie), one of my little peculiar, idiosyncratic literary pet peeves; I want to go on a wild slapping spree (as Zippy would say) with people who bemoan books without happy endings. I just don’t get it. But I digress again.

In the end, Will Cooper owns quite a few shares of the railroad, and we see him roosting stubbornly on his front porch, taking shots at a passenger train that thunders by on his property — an ending as memorable as the book’s opening. And we are reminded of Cooper’s previous words, another variant on a favorite Frazier theme: “So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life – joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss – from fire into smoke, rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.” Welcome back, Frazier.





3 comments to “The Welcome Return of Charles Frazier”

  1. I. Have. To. Read. This.

    I am so jealous of you having already read it (in a week, no less!), but so glad you reviewed it so well, because I can see now that I need to save this one for after my class ends, so I can really savor it. You’re right, he’s such a good writer – I thought Cold Mountain was up there with Faulkner.


  2. Yes, curses to the circulation policies that give you a truncated check-out time for a book on hold. I completely understand not being able to renew it, but ONE WEEK???? Ick. And for those who told me to just keep it as long as I wanted and pay the overdue fees, well . . . I’m a hopeless geek and kept thinking of those others waiting on it. But, yes, I managed to pull it off in one week.

    Anyway, did you read, eisha, the Yardley review? I can respect a differing opinion, but the “cracker barrel” and “I reckon” comments were just too dismissive and soooo unfair. Ouch.


  3. nope, and i think i’ll wait on it until after i actually read the book. but then i will read it and seethe with you.


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