‘Cold Mountain’ Good, Not Great

Normally, I don’t get around to reading any given year’s most acclaimed book until long after its hardback release. I’m more of a paperback guy.

Face it. There are just too many books to keep track of, especially for a part-time books editor. And at $25 a pop, hardback book-buying has become an expensive proposition.

But 1997 was different. Charles Frazier’s acclaimed first novel “Cold Mountain” came out over the summer, so I was able to borrow a friend’s copy fairly easily.

I was curious. From almost the beginning, the book had garnered heaps of critical praise. It was promoted through full-page ads in such august publications as the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker, was read on Public Radio by “Radio Reader” Dick Estell and it ended up earning the National Book Award.

Still ranked atop most best-seller lists, it’s now being included on virtually every Top 10 books compilation being printed around the country.

Well pardon me, but I beg to differ.

Let me begin by saying that I recognize the book’s many qualities. Frazier, a college-professor-turned-horse-breeder, has all the storyteller’s tools. He knows how to set a scene, in this case the South of North Carolina during the closing months of the Civil War, and he knows how to capture a character in prose that is as artistically stilted as it is pointedly direct.

“He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly as among the neardead, that it seemed no longer dark and mysterious,” Frazier writes of his male protagonist, a war-weary Southern veteran named Inman. “He feared his heart had been touched by the fire so often he might never make a civilian again.”

Grievously wounded, Inman decides that the war has lost its meaning, if it had ever had one, and he decides to return home. His journey, almost entirely on foot, has been called “Homeric.”

Inman’s saga is only half of “Cold Mountain,” though. The other half involves the woman that he left behind, the proud Ada, whose circumstances have fallen, and Ruby, the pragmatist whose knowledge and determination become Ada’s sole hope of survival.

Both sides of the literary equation - Inman on his odyssey, Ada and Ruby in their willful march on nature - share equally in Frazier’s novel. Their relative struggles illuminate Frazier’s attempts to portray the Civil War South as a Darwinistic nightmare, where the strong have the best chance of surviving but where even strength can’t always overcome the twin dualities of persistence and dumb luck.

Frazier is masterful in the way he weaves the two stories together, surprising - nay, shocking - us even while he leads us to an ending that is well foretold.

And yet I felt cheated.

Let me be clear about this. I don’t insist that art reflect life as I see it. I don’t insist that art take me where I want to go at the expense of the artist’s intent. I certainly don’t insist that art reject its own sense of truth just to adhere to my own sense of right and wrong.

But this is what I know about life: It’s an ongoing story, one that doesn’t end in 23 minutes of sitcom time, two hours of movie time or two weeks of good reading time. It doesn’t end with birth, and it certainly doesn’t end with death. In the sense that we are all part of humankind’s saga, our common story never ends.

Each artist is free, then, to determine what part of that story he or she wants to portray, or emphasize, beginning to end. And even beyond.

Yet in the way that Frazier takes us along, the way he gives his characters one obstacle after another to surmount, the way he teases us with a vision of the way life could be only to snatch it back with an unrelenting finality… in the way he does all of this, I think, ultimately, that he plays a cruel joke on his readers.

Many of you, no doubt, will disagree. The sales of the book, which went through five printings totaling 60,000 copies during its first few weeks alone, indicate that “Cold Mountain” is striking - and that it continues to strike - a chord in readers around the country.

I think, however, that there’s a pretty good chance that I’m not the only one who, upon finishing it, threw “Cold Mountain” across the room.

Auntie’s on the air

If you missed Robert Fulghum’s Nov. 20 appearance at Auntie’s Bookstore, Nancy Roth is giving you a second chance to hear the thoughts of the critically acclaimed author of “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”

“Auntie’s Voices,” a monthly program broadcast on Spokane Public Radio (KPBX, FM 91.1), will feature an interview between Roth and Fulghum at 12:30 on Monday. For further information, call 328-5729.

The reader board

Victor Kennedy will hold a question-and-answer session concerning Subud, which held an international conference in Spokane last summer, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Auntie’s Bookstore.

, DataTimes