Indian bummer

In his highly anticipated follow-up to "Cold Mountain," Charles Frazier explores 19th century America's brutal program to expel Indians. As a richly imagined historical novel, it draws out the best and worst of literary fiction.

By Laura Miller

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Oct. 5, 2006 | In publishing circles, the runaway success of Charles Frazier's 1997 novel "Cold Mountain" is often declared to be puzzling; the book is so resolutely old-fashioned, so unsexy, so solemn. The answer lies in the novel's unusual appeal to both sides of the ever-dwindling readership for literary fiction. There's war and travel for the men (you can get some men to read about the Civil War who will ordinarily read about nothing else) and an epic love story for the women. The novel's ostensible ancestor is the Odyssey; it depicts a Civil War deserter's journey home to the woman he left behind in Carolina hill country. But the less exalted secret ingredient is a healthy dash of "Little House on the Prairie." Echoes of the Laura Ingalls Wilder children's classic can be found in Frazier's loving descriptions of how Ada, the woman waiting back home, learns to run a cabin, raise and dry tobacco and turn a crop of apples into the valuable commodity of hard cider.

Frazier's second novel, "Thirteen Moons," is both more accessible than "Cold Mountain" and somewhat less likely to catch on. "Cold Mountain" was stonily committed to its 19th century setting. You either submitted to the stately pace and rural preoccupations of that earlier time or you were repelled by the surface of the novel's prose and became one of those people who pled mystification at its popularity. Those of us who could adjust to Frazier's style, though, found ourselves genuinely transported -- something historical fiction can rarely achieve -- into the mental rhythms of a far less jittery and overstimulated way of life.

"Thirteen Moons" is also set in the Smoky Mountains, but it's really a western masquerading as a faux memoir. The voice -- first-person narration from one Will Cooper, an orphan adopted by the chief of a dwindling Cherokee village who goes on to become a lawyer, a state senator, a colonel in the Civil War, and most important, the defender of the Indians' last shred of their old life -- is pure frontier raconteur. Cooper is roughly based on William Holland Thomas, a famous Carolina figure who led a company of Cherokee fighters in the Confederate Army.

Despite the widely held notion that irony is an affectation uniquely beloved by postmodern smartypants, you can find plenty of 19th century American writers who relished the device, especially when describing life on the nation's ragged Western edge. They got a kick out of applying the decorous language of the Victorian establishment to the brutal reality around them. Frazier adopts their tone when he has Cooper observe, while lingering by the Mississippi, that "little brown frogs lived in the mud of the riverbank, and pink-headed buzzards fell in drunkard angles from the sky and stepped through the mud to eat them, and sometimes the commerce between the two parties went on right at the legs of my table."

Although Cooper is no less a man of his time than Inman, the hero of "Cold Mountain," the Twainian humor he uses in telling his story is an element of the American style that's stuck with us. Autobiography, which is what "Thirteen Moons" pretends to be, is the signature narrative form of the moment. As a result, Cooper's voice feels more familiar and congenial than the third-person narration of "Cold Mountain," and contemporary readers should slip into Frazier's second novel more easily. I wouldn't necessarily call this a concession to the marketplace, since you could hardly expect a fellow like Cooper to recount his life in the somber, mythic mode of "Cold Mountain," but "Thirteen Moons" still lacks the fierce, uncompromising quality that made "Cold Mountain" so striking.

"Cold Mountain" had the air of a book written by a man holed up in a house in the woods, aiming to please no one but himself; "Thirteen Moons" is a novel with a relationship, albeit an uneasy one, to the world. This is most evident in a passage where Cooper -- a great reader, like Ada in "Cold Mountain" -- scoffs at an essay in a journal decrying the "state of recent fiction. Its judgment was harsh, on the grounds that we live in a happy, beautiful, virile age. And yet our stories are unnecessarily glum. We do not want sighs or tears. We are all seeking happiness, whether through money or position. It is our privilege to resent any attempts to force unhappy thoughts on us."

Whether or not Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science and the Arts ever ran such a piece (I'm not convinced that the term "recent fiction" was common currency in the mid-1800s), this is a flagrant dig at the philistines who objected to the gloomy ending of "Cold Mountain." Frazier borrows the credibility of his likable, no-nonsense narrator to take a pot shot at his own critics, a self-serving anachronism the author of "Cold Mountain" would never have stooped to. Cooper's reply to the critic's complaint is to wordlessly take a couple of swigs from his flask; it's too stupid to merit any further response.

Aside from the occasional lapse, Cooper is good company. His adventures in the uncharted Indian Nation, where his relatives sell him into indentured servitude working as a clerk at an isolated trading post, and his later exploits in Washington and traveling along the Mississippi make for amusing reading. From his adoptive father, Bear, he learns what's left of the Cherokee ways, and this comes with ample dollops of classic village humor, mostly about the humiliating situations men get into on account of sex. The structure of "Thirteen Moons" is necessarily episodic -- that's how life happens, as Cooper explains at one point -- with a few recurring themes.

First among these themes is the passing away of the Indians' world. Some of the best scenes in the novel take place during the "removal" of 1838, President Andrew Jackson's brutal program designed to expel all Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi River. Bear and the small community he presides over manage to elude the infamous Trail of Tears thanks to a considerable amount of wheeling, dealing and deed accumulation on the part of Cooper. The fate of a less fortunate Cherokee, an aged patriarch known as Charley, as he tries to hide his clan in the mountains, serves as the novel's grim centerpiece.

The other, less effective motif in Cooper's story is his thwarted, lifelong love for Claire, a girl he wins in a poker game from a part-Indian horse thief and plantation owner named Featherstone, and then loses again when Featherstone reneges on the deal. Later on, the two young lovers conduct a largely al fresco affair featuring enough good wine, sunburned buttocks and discussions of Byron's poetry to suggest that Frazier wants to wrassle novelist Jim Harrison for the title of official Lusty Yet Cultured Old Coot of American literature. Cooper and Claire are kept apart for reasons not always entirely clear, so he gets to go on and on about how he's never forgotten her, keeps an old coat in the attic that might still harbor a little of her scent, and much, much later receives mysterious staticky calls on the newfangled telephone in which he thinks he hears, faintly, her voice.

This relationship is pretty notional and not in the least bit interesting or believable. I suspect it was tossed into the mix to make Cooper seem sweeter and more romantic. (William Holland Thomas, the historical figure on whom Cooper was based, had a wife and children, a far more intriguing scenario.) Cooper goes on to do his share of whoring and courting, coming close to marrying once or twice, but he insists that "had Claire been fully mine since I won her as a boy, I would have lived a life of utter fidelity." A nice sentiment, and one conveniently untested by the events of Cooper's life as Frazier constructs them. But why be so scrupulous about sticking to the rambling, unnovelistic structure of real experience and then turn your hero's love life into the stuff of a Hollywood movie?

Next page: If only Frazier hadn't adopted the dreary mannerisms of today's literary fiction since writing "Cold Mountain"