Charles Frazier, who lives here in Ashvegas, has a new book out in stores on Tuesday. “Thirteen Moons” is his second after beloved “Cold Mountain.” We’ll buy it to support the local writer. But he’s having a tough time with the critics, which appear mixed. Most of the big shots are either luke warm, or don’t like it at all. Others absolutely love it.
You decide.
Publisher’s Weekly, at Powell’s Books, loves it.
“When Frazier’s debut Cold Mountain blossomed into a National Book Award–winning bestseller with four million copies in print, expectations for the follow-up rose almost immediately. A decade later, the good news is that Frazier’s storytelling prowess doesn’t falter in this sophomore effort, a bountiful literary panorama again set primarily in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains.
…With pristine prose that’s often wry, Frazier brings a rough-and-tumble pioneer past magnificently to life, indicts America with painful bluntness for the betrayal of its native people and recounts a romance rife with sadness. … The history that Frazier hauntingly unwinds through Will is as melodic as it is melancholy, but the sublime love story is the narrative’s true heart.” Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Thirteen Moons brings this vanished world thrillingly alive, retelling the agonizing stories of “the Removal” (of Indians from their ancestral lands) and the lie of “Reconstruction”; creating literally dozens of heart-stopping word pictures (e.g., autumns display “a few stunted pumpkins still glowing in the fields and a few persistent apples hanging red in the skeletal orchards”); building unforgettable characterizations of the sorrow-laden everyman Will (whom we first, then finally glimpse as a reclusive anachronism, weathered by “a near century of living”), unpredictable Featherstone and stoical Bear (a character Faulkner might have created), Claire who belongs to no man, ancient medicine woman Granny Squirrel, and all the uprooted and dispossessed souls enduring “the days and nights, the thirteen moons” of each accumulating year, while making their final journey “to the Nightland.”
One of the great Native American, and American stories, and a great gift to all of us, from one of our very best writers
New York Times review Kakutani doesn’t like it. “The passage of time — in the life of the nation and in Will’s own life — seems to be Mr. Frazier’s real subject in this moving but fundamentally flawed novel.”
The New Yorker doesn’t like it.
There are successful scenes along the way, and, as in “Cold Mountain,” the world of the Appalachian forest primeval is brought to life. But neither of the plot lines is effective, and the problem is Cooper. He’s too important an actor in the historical drama, so he can reflect on it but he cannot reflect it; and he’s too eccentric a figure in the private drama.
Booklist says “Thirteen Moons” is OK.
… And he remains faithful to a method that marked “Cold Mountain” in readers’ memories: a proliferation of detail about customs and costumes, about food and recreation–pretty much what everything looked and smelled like. Unfortunately, for the first fourth of the book, there is too much detail for the plot to easily bear. But, finally, the characters are able to step out from behind this blanket of particulars and incidentals and make the story work. Expect considerable demand, of course. Brad Hooper Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley review rips Frazier.
Read a bit of “Thirteen Moons” on the Washington Post’s web site here.
Reading Frazier is like sitting by the cracker barrel for hour after hour and listening to an amiable but impossibly gassy guy who talks real slow, says “I reckon” a whole lot and never shuts up. His novels have little structure and not much in the way of plot…
… In other words, in Thirteen Moons Frazier essentially has fictionalized history. Nothing wrong with that: happens all the time. But the novel provides less imagination and invention than readers are likely to expect; it reads more like a dutifully researched (check out that author’s note) graduate school paper than a work of fiction.
… Will readers flock to Thirteen Moons as they did to Cold Mountain ? Who knows? Frazier’s new publisher has a ton of money invested in him and will be pulling out all the stops. One thing is certain: Thirteen Moons is going to be putting a whole bunch of people to sleep.
Jim Buchanan’s column about “Thirteen Moons” in the Asheville Citizen-Times. He loves it.
2 Comments
welcome! smart-ass.
Great roundup! Thanks!
Are you going to "but" the book? I wanna see that!