Charles Frazier

My second favorite novel, and the one first novel that I ever cried upon reading, is Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. As the film version was coming out on Christmas Day 2003 and starring a few of my personal favorite actors (Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger), I wanted to read the novel before seeing it on the big screen. On December 23, I was nearing the end of the novel when the plot introduces snow, or the point where I feel you can't stop reading. So while baking batches of Christmas cookies, I reached the completion of this extraordinary text, one that is considered an "American Odyssey" as Inman, one of the protagonists, an outlier Confederate soldier, journeys back to Cold Mountain, meeting a slew of characters that reflect the degradation of what war does to those in uniform and what war does to those left behind without money, morals, and motivation (although the Goat Lady is a bright shining light of humanity just when you think there is nothing left that war has not touched) and Ada (her name means "noble," something I know quite well as my late rabbit was named after her), his beloved, who must figure out how to be a farmer and to survive off the land left without her father, Inman, or anyone to take care of day-to-day living, until Ruby comes along to teach a Southern belle taught only accomplishments what it means to plant, craft, and work. ''=

Charles Frazier is an incredible writer with his texts full of rich language, comparisons, and character development. In my opinion, this is the best paragraph I've ever read:

"At the hospital, the doctors looked at him and said their was not much they could do. He might live or her might now. They gave him but a grey rag and a little basin to clean his own wound.Those first few days, when he broke consciousness enough to do it, he wiped at his neck with the rag until the water in the basin was the color of the comb on a turkey-cock. But mainly the wound had wanted to clean itself. Before it started scabbing, ti spit out a number of things: a collar button and a piece of wool from the shirt he had been wearing when he was hit, a shard of soft grey metal as big as a quarter dollar piece, and, unaccountable, something that closely resembled a peach pit. That last he set on the nightstand and studied for some days. He could never settle his mind on whether it was part of him or not. He finally threw it out the window but then had troubling dreams that it has taken roots and grown, like Jack's bean, into something monstrous." 

I read this novel to Cora last year (Wuthering Heights was first), and I spent a lot of time talking about war and what it results in for everyone involved - watching people of hope and life be condemned to mental and emotional scars that still haunt the land to this day. (I also read this book to my Ada when she was a 4 month old bunny, and she would "boing" - if you have rabbits, you know that is their own special way of jumping - every time she heard her name.) In my interpretation, Frazier brings in a lot of moments that exhibit how horribly violent America was becoming and how this would be the start of greater hardship in the future.

One other novel that stands out by Frazier is Nightwoods, set more in the present than his other works. I started rereading it this week to remind myself of the plot: two children whose mother has been murdered go to live with their aunt while the murderer attempts to find them. The book really brings up a lot about the lack of justice that happens and how victims are often the ones who have their reputations destroyed by law/lawyers as part of a defense. The limited third person point of view rotates between the aunt, the killer, and a man who owns land, so the reader rotates between empathy and disgust as the narrators have their say. The first line of the novel is very telling: "Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent." And that polysyndeton, which is throughout the novel by the way, especially when dealing with Luce's love of nature, clarifies the entire novel.

I hope you give either or both novels a read, especially since Frazier is a modern author and still writing novels of incredible depth, specific milieu, and characters that haunt you, in so many different ways, long past reading.