BitterSweetLife

Cold Mountain : A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

Since I firmly believe that books should be read in their native habitats, it was obvious that en route to Glacier Park would be the ideal setting to read Cold Mountain.

Charles Frazier’s first novel drew rave reviews and a movie deal with the star treatment—and in a sense, I get it. This was Frazier’s first novel, he splashed hickory smoke and blood across 400-some pages, so real you could smell it, and crafted an ending that elicits physical symptoms. He was the “National Book Award” winner—and I see it. Sort of.

Frazier’s characterizations are lean but thorough, and his language is in-your-face crude and still tugs at heart-strings; this is an intense, gripping book, and worth a read. Unfortunately, Frazier’s philosophy is incoherent—and this is a trait in literature that never fails to annoy. If Cold Mountain was intended as a Civil War-era documentary, an unsparing microcosm of our national tragedy, well and good. But Frazier can’t resist crossing into philosophical speculation.

Cold Mountain’s protagonist, Inman, must be considered a stoic in the modern sense, violently self-sufficient, meeting horror with resigned despair: “All the resurrection any man might expect was…to be dragged dead from the grave at rope’s end” (p. 397). Inman is a dead-earnest cynic with a gun, and the world Frazier paints is harsh and starkly material. His dialogue (lacking quotation marks), gives conversations an understated feel, as if the words arise more from narrative circumstances than from the characters’ minds. Well, all right. Naturalistic portraits can have their point.

But Frazier’s story becomes nonsensical when it marries this mechanistic life to vivid natural beauty and “cures of all sorts” (p. 418)—as if a brutal, Darwinist world occasionally dresses in pastels, and ought to be adored. Frazier “theologizes” the book's Cold Mountain as a kind of archetype, the omniscient object of Inman’s journey, and the context for fruitful householding. He dresses it up, venerates the mountain, and that’s where his philosophy stumbles:

Are we to fight and claw or are we to sigh and plant gardens? Do mountains contain awe, or just a great deal of matter? When all is said and done, this story is ultimately deterministic, and the ending bears this out. (An overly blunt analogy would be The Call of the Wild starring humans.) But it’s not convincingly deterministic—which leaves one strangely dissatisfied.

Especially when one’s driving to Glacier Park.