Cold Mountain

National Review, Dec 31, 1997 by James Gardner

Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier (Atlantic Monthly Press, 356 pp., $24)

APPARENTLY Charles Frazier's best-seller, Cold Mountain, is the object of a certain resentment in the long-suffering publishing community. That the National Book Award for fiction went to this first novel, rather than to Don DeLillo's latest work, the clear favorite, caused dismay in certain circles, where Cold Mountain was seen, according to one account in the New York Times, as "the finger-painting equivalent of Mr. DeLillo's Michelangelo, Underworld."

Though the book has many virtues, other factors have doubtless contributed to its success. In a sense it is this year's English Patient, with a smidgen of The Bridges of Madison County thrown in for good measure. By this I mean that there seems to be at least one book each year which spans the gap between entertainment and highbrow culture. This is the sort of book that causes the reader to feel good about himself for having read it. Self-consciously literary without being opaque, it presents us with characters of the requisite complexity, neither as complicated and self-absorbed as those in Mr. DeLillo's indubitably highbrow books, nor as subordinated to the dictates of compelling action as in your basic Grisham or Clancy novel.

Cold Mountain, set in the southern Blue Ridge Mountains during the final months of the Civil War, is an ambitious example of the historical novel. But unlike most specimens of the genre -- and very much to its credit -- the book treats the past as if it were, in a way, present. Most historical narrative is overtly escapist: the past is rendered in all its exotic alienness, as a travel option for those who are weary of modern times. That it was once lived as present, an obvious fact, plays little part in the equation: the vitality of the characters is entirely subordinated to quaint speech and period costumes. And yet, there is something irreducibly constant about the present, whether it is being lived in Marguerite Yourcenar's second-century Rome, or Tolstoy's Napoleonic Moscow, or Frazier's Confederate South. Though Frazier has acquired a scholar's feel for the period's idioms, costumes, and mores, these become for him merely the conduits through which passes the fluent essence of life lived now. They are not, as so often, its gaudy substitute.

Cold Mountain is the story of a homecoming. After four years of fighting under General Lee, the world-weary Inman makes his way home to his beloved Ada. While Ada spends her time playing the piano, reading Dickens, and trying to run the farm she has inherited from her father, Inman falls in with various women, travels with an itinerant preacher, is forcibly detained in the backwoods, and manages to slay three Union soldiers who have been harassing a young woman. In certain details, Frazier reveals a genuine novelistic talent and tact which simply cannot be faked. Just before Inman shoots one of the soldiers, toward whom he has been creeping up from behind, his victim "took the hat off and ran his hand through his hair. He was going bald at the back of his head." Afterward, "The two riflemen by the fire called out to the dead man over and over, and Inman discovered that his name had been Eben." Elsewhere Mr. Frazier skillfully observes the easy commerce between two women sitting beside a hearth: "Ruby took Ada's hand and held it and absently removed Ada's silver bracelet and slipped it over her own hand and then after a time returned it to its place."

Frazier clearly takes pleasure in the English language. He is of the school that believes that any Anglo-Saxon word is better -- because more authentic -- than its Latinate equivalent. Sometimes this zeal is taken almost to the point of parody: "She stopped the salve crock with a cob and put it in Inman's coat pocket." "From a leather case he took a fleam." Like his protagonist, Frazier is congenitally soft-spoken. This being a novel for the Nineties, there is naturally some talk of masturbation, but it is dealt with so decorously that the inattentive reader might miss its sense completely. After speaking of "lone love," Frazier says of Ada that "Sometime after midnight she took the easement of maiden, spinster, widow."

At times I have a problem with this understatement. Understatement is effective only when there is real purpose to the meiosis. Lately, however, it has become a stylistic tick designed precisely to conceal a lack of true feeling or thought. Indeed, it has come to sound so novelistic, so arty, that even popular novelists have taken to using it. All too often one has this feeling of gratuitousness in the constant understatement that informs Cold Mountain.

Frazier's desire to sound novelistic reveals itself in other ways. Often, one feels, his characters are infused with a faux complexity, a host of "issues" to make them seem heavier than they otherwise would. When, toward the end of Cold Mountain, Inman is finally reunited with Ada, the one thing he has dreamed of throughout the novel, she at first doesn't recognize him. This is not remarkable, since they have not seen each other in half a decade and he has just been released from the hospital. But listen to how he reacts. "'I believe I have made a mistake,' he said. He turned to walk away." Now this is entirely implausible. Only people in novels act like that -- though one might not expect it even in novels which, like this one, are supposed to be the last word in understated realism. In real life a man in this situation would insistently identify himself, he and his wife would embrace, and drinks would follow.