For a first novelist, in fact for any novelist, Charles Frazier has taken on a daunting task — and has done extraordinarily well by it. In prose filled with grace notes and trenchant asides, he has reset much of the Odyssey in 19th-century America, near the end of the Civil War ... The author's Ithaca lies deep within the Carolina mountains and is the elusive goal of his Odysseus, a wounded Confederate veteran named Inman...he resolves to reclaim himself and his humanity by fleeing the hospital where he is recovering, returning to his home and to Ada, his Penelope...both of Frazier's characters are between their pasts and their futures, escaping the former and traveling toward the latter ... A wealth of finely realized supporting characters gives Frazier's novel a subtext of richness and subtlety.
The book is so professionally archaeological, so competently dug, that one can mistake its surfaces for depth. But it's like a cemetery with no bodies in it ... Cold Mountain is utterly convincing in an unreal way ... Inman is silent, good, and strong — one must imagine a Confederate Clint Eastwood ... He is a Homeric foot soldier — Frazier has said he had Odysseus in mind — and quite unreal. The novel's unreality flows from Inman's unreality ... Frazier is a good writer: calm, for the most part unsentimental, often rich. But the novel is a refined exercise ...Frazier sacrifices aesthetic life to historical life. The result is that while one continues to believe Cold Mountain on the surface, one stops believing it at any deeper level. There is a false consciousness to a late 20th-century writer's efforts to evoke a 19th-century man in a language that belongs to neither.
Cold Mountain, which takes its title from a peak in the Great Balsam Mountains of Northern Carolina, certainly carries its author's knowledge of a particular area. But natural description is there to follow the two main characters' eyes and minds ... The novel's chapters alternate between their stories, both of which require an attention to the natural world: Inman's attention because he must survive in the wilds; Ada's attention because she has committed herself to hewing a living out of a wilderness ... Natural description is also natural history. A native of the mountain country of the Southern Appalachians, Inman carries the names of plants and trees in his head, and the narrative names them without any concession to any reader's ignorance.
Charles Frazier uses reverse psychology to great advantage in his debut novel, Cold Mountain, a Civil War saga with blood on its bayonets and romance in its gentle soul ...reshaping the true battle tales of his great-great-grandfather into an epic story that accumulates power and purpose with each turn of the page ... Our hero, Inman, much like the sensitive lead character in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, is sickened by the wanton waste of young lives on the battlefield and torn between the traditional conflict of valor and cowardice ... So the eventful journey back to his sweetheart, Ada, begins. Frazier takes us into the life and mind of Ada, a young girl stunned by the sudden death of her consumptive father ... It is the emotional bond between these two sturdy souls and their startling evolution as characters which lift this novel above and beyond the usual offerings in historical fiction.
A grim story about a tough, resourceful Southern family in the Civil War is somewhat submerged by the weight of lyrical detail piled on the tale, and by the slow pace of the telling ...no doubt that Frazier can write; the problem is that he stops so often to savor the sheer pleasure of the act of writing in this debut effort ... The tragic climax is convincing but somewhat rushed, given the many dilatory scenes that have preceded it. Frazier has Cormac McCarthy's gift for rendering the pitch and tang of regional speech, and for catching some of the true oddity of human nature, but he doesn't yet possess McCarthy's ferocious focus.
Rich in evocative physical detail and timeless human insight, this debut novel set in the Civil War era rural South considers themes both grand (humanity's place in nature) and intimate (a love affair transformed by the war) as a wounded soldier makes his way home to the highlands of North Carolina and to his prewar sweetheart ... Frazier vividly depicts the rough and varied terrain of Inman's travels and the colorful characters he meets, all the while avoiding Federal raiders and the equally brutal Home Guard ... In a leisurely, literate narrative, Frazier shows how lives of soldiers and of civilians alike deepen and are transformed as a direct consequence of the war's tragedy.
