New York Times review of ‘Thirteen Moons’

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

1

Charles Frazier, who lives here in Ashvegas, has a new book coming out next week. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called Thirteen Moons. He got paid $8 million, but most folks don’t seem to like it much. We’re trying to keep tabs on some of the big reviewers and their opinions. So here’s critic Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times.

Kakutani doesn’t love the book. Nor does she rip Frazier a new one. Her review falls somewhere in between. Take this, for example, as the review contrasts the book to Frazier’s “Cold Mountain”:

In other respects, however, the two novels could not be more different. Whereas the narrative in “Cold Mountain” was rich and dense as a fruitcake, “Thirteen Moons” — despite its often somber subject matter — is a considerably airier production: reminiscent, at times, of Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man” and a lot closer to Larry McMurtry than to Cormac McCarthy.

Whereas the love story in “Cold Mountain” felt like a real romance between two real people, fleshed out in intimate psychological detail, the one in “Thirteen Moons” feels more like an authorial construct between his hero and a beauteous wraith who mysteriously appears and disappears as the plot demands.

Although the reader believes in the youthful passion that the novel’s narrator, Will Cooper, feels for Claire and roots for them to end up together, Mr. Frazier does little to make their relationship remotely palpable or plausible. Claire goes hot and cold on Will for no discernible reason, often vanishing from his life for years, even decades at a time, and she remains a bizarrely opaque character throughout the novel: more some sort of chivalric symbol than a flesh and blood woman like Ada in “Cold Mountain.”

Kakutani continues on, describing the tale and showing some love for Frazier’s sense of place and “pointillist prose to give the reader an aching appreciation” of the plight of the Cherokee Indians. But she still feels that Frazier falls shot in delivering the book’s love story.

Mr. Frazier recounts Will’s melancholy adventures with plenty of narrative brio, giving the reader a succession of suspenseful — and in some cases touching — set pieces: the young Will venturing out into the wilderness for the first time, armed only with a sketchy map and a few provisions; Will facing off in a duel with Claire’s sadistic guardian, Featherstone; Will and Bear deciding to hunt down a group of their own people (who have killed some government soldiers) to win permission to stay on their land.
As for Will’s infrequent meetings with Claire, they are compelling enough but ultimately disappointing, given Claire’s strangely inscrutable and erratic behavior. For that matter “Thirteen Moons” is at its most eloquent not in chronicling Will’s love life or even his peregrinations around America, but in using his story to give us a window on a country in transition, hurtling from an era of coonskin hats into one of “telephones and mile-a-minute automobiles and electric lights and moving pictures and trains.

But in the end, the book just doesn’t work for Kakutani:

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. “Alarming, really,” Will thinks, “how all the wheels of the world — the days and nights, the thirteen moons, the four seasons, and the great singular round of the year itself — begin spinning faster and faster the closer we get to the Nightland. We’re called to it and it pulls us. And the weaker we become, the harder and faster it pulls.”