Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS OPINIONS AND REVIEWS Charles Frazier. Cold Mountain. New York: Grove Atlantic Press, Inc., 1997. 345 pages. $27.95. Trade paper, $14.00 I just finished reading through dozens and dozens ofcomments on Cold Mountain. The internet bookstore at invites readers to review books, and a record-breaking number have recorded their opinions of the National Book Award-winning bestseller by firsttime novelist Charles Frazier. Unlike the professional reviewers and critics I have read on the subject, ordinary readers respond to the Civil War opus with very mixed opinions, ranging from skyhigh praises to rockbottom denunciations. They love it and hate it, find it too long or too short, call Frazier's style brilliant and/or tedious, loathe the love story or weep over it, and so on. They note resemblances to Homer, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, and many other writers. By any standard, Cold Mountain—still on the bestseller list, although no longer first—is a novel that has created an unusual stir, a fuss, a to-do. Large numbers of the internet readers state that they tackled the novel only because it was a media event, only because ofthe hype: and almost all those who confess to that particular motivation end up despising Cold Mountain, complaining of all the descriptions they had to wade through, sniping at the unhappy ending they worked so hard and hopefully to reach. And now I am faced with the unenviable task of coming up with an evaluation and an interpretation of Cold Mountain that have not (perhaps) been proposed yet. Like the other readers, I suppose, I must start by announcing my own experience ofthe reading ofthis extraordinary book. I loved it—couldn't put it down, paradoxically longed to get on with it and yearned to have it last forever. I could gladly have gone on reading Cold Mountain, but it ended, not with the ending I wanted, but perhaps with the conclusion this particular work requires. Cold Mountain is not a novel written by a master storyteller (as some critics maintain). As reader after reader noted, it is much too slowly paced for that, with some very abrupt, even clumsy junctures into subsidiary stories. The basic plot is simplicity itself, with chapters alternating between Inman wandering and Ada waiting. Homer's tale of Odysseus and Penelope, which forms one literary basis for Cold Mountain, is 56 structurally much more complex than Frazier's novel. The picaresque element in Cold Mountain, with incidents and characters reminiscent of Huck Finn's journey, is also weaker than its apparent model, falling far short ofTwain's mordant, satiric portraits oflowlifes and rascals. Frazier's characters in and ofthemselves—that is, apart from their interaction with an environment—are not particularly welldrawn. They serve the work quite well, but I would argue that Cold Mountain is not primarily about them. Think of another best-selling first novel set during the Civil War: Gone With the Wind. Now Scarlett O'Hara, like it or lump it, there's a memorable character, indelibly etched on the world's memory. Ada in Cold Mountain cannot hold a candle to Scarlett, ifmemorable characterization is our primary concern. For me, the power ofFrazier's creation derives from a quite different and quite unexpected literary model: Cold Mountain might be considered a Keatsian novel, a work with negative capability. (Keats, like Homer, is direcdy invoked in allusions to Ada's reading.) As Keats defines it, negative capability "is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." Or perhaps— to make the matter even more extreme—Cold Mountain aspires to the haiku: creating and at the same time denying meaning only by the evocative means of specific images and names. My key to Cold Mountain is its resistance to metaphor, its repudiation of generalization. It lives in specificity, in named things, in particular actions. Ada finds herself stranded on a farm she cannot work or understand, until Ruby—the great avatar of detail—arrives on the scene to instruct her. Ada's father, Monroe, has taught her that the North Carolina mountains "like all elements ofnature . . .were...