WARMING UP TO COLD MOUNTAIN

There just aren’t a whole lot of stories around for a storyteller to tell. There’s the one that begins, A girl met a boy — there’s the one that begins, A stranger came to town — and then there’s the one that begins, There was a man, a long, long way from home. Out in the deep end of the pool, the first shows up as Anna Karenina, the second as Oedipus Rex, and the third as the Odyssey. And splashing happily in the shallows of literature, the first turns out to be Erich Segal’s 1970 Love Story, the second Robert James Waller’s 1992 The Bridges of Madison County, and the third America’s current bestseller, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain.

It would be hard to avoid having heard about the phenomenon of Cold Mountain. The book has sold at least a million copies in hard cover, clung to the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-six weeks, been snatched up by Hollywood for $ 1.25 million, and received a surprising National Book Award (beating out Don DeLillo’s heavily favored Underworld). Over twelve hundred pieces about Frazier’s novel have appeared in American newspapers and magazines, and reviewers are at last reduced to telling more about the story of the book than about the story in the book.

But there is of course a story in the book, a story that has been around since Homer and hasn’t gotten stale. It’s a Civil War tale of a soldier named Inman — a long, long way from his western North Carolina home — who wakes up one 1864 morning in a field hospital of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and reckons that since the war is pretty much lost, he’d best get on back to Miss Ada, the good woman waiting for him on a highland farm way up in the mountains.

Along his road home, Inman spends considerable time recollecting his childhood — specially the teachings he received from the last of the Cherokees — and he has his full quota of adventures: rescuing imperiled women and children, travelling beside a lapsed preacher, dodging the Home Guard rounding up “outliers” for the last futile war effort, and narrowly escaping three alluring harpies looking either to kill him or marry him, or maybe both.

And meanwhile, in alternate chapters, Miss Ada is having her own share of adventures. The daughter of an Emerson-and-water, socialgospel sort of Protestant minister come from an upper-class Charleston family to preach in the wilds of the Blue Ridge mountains, Ada is hard-pressed to keep the family farm going after her father’s death. What she’d like most to do is wander the fields in spring, sketching the flowers, reading George Eliot, and remembering the snubs she gave all the young men besides Inman who came to court and spark. Only she’s starving to death doing it — Frazier is convincing at the details of the inflationary Confederate economy toward the end of the war — and it’s not till a ragamuffin farm girl named Ruby shows up to help that the long wait for Inman becomes bearable.

Ruby is the daughter of an itinerant fiddler who reappears occasionally to make life difficult (although one time he brings along, so everyone can pair off nicely at the novel’s end, a young deserter just right for a hard-headed woman like Ruby to transform from no-account white trash into a man of substance). Between them, the two manless women manfully improve the farm, flourish in the small towns’ barter markets, and braid one another’s womanly hair by firelight.

From its opening among the dying and the sightless in an army hospital, however, the novel has promised a tragic ending. Even as Inman nears Ada and home, the lawless Home Guard has drawn closer and closer. He manages to kill all the worst ones, but at last they shoot him down and he dies — though not before he has one night of passion with Ada. Cold Mountain ends with a picture, a few years down the road, of Ruby and her shaped-up husband still living on the farm. And Miss Ada? She watches at play the daughter of her night with her returned Odysseus and muses with a sad smile how (in one last salvo from the novel’s barrage of classical reference) she and Inman just never had a chance to grow old together and turn into trees like Baucis and Philemon.

In the acknowledgements at the back of the book, where he explains that he drew his story from the genuine adventures of a Confederate ancestor, Frazier gives his hero’s name as W. P. Inman. In the novel itself, however, the character is just plain “Inman,” suggesting — well, suggesting for Frazier all sorts of much too easy things: that Inman is the complete-in-himself man, for instance, who is inside of all kinds of secrets that most folks just wrap themselves around the outside of. His lack of a Christian name gives him a superficial whiff of the mysterious (Remember how, in Jack Schaefer’s classic 1949 a-strangercame-to-town tale, Shane had just that one name, and nobody could figure out whether it was his first or his last?), while simultaneously hinting in a facile way that though Inman may like to tell a story or two from time to time, the reader is not to forget that he’s really the strong, silent type whose rich inner life is shielded from the prying and prattle of flashy outer men.

This style of close literary criticism, however, is in fact unfair to Cold Mountain, the result of shining much too bright a light on the book. Charles Frazier has his pretensions, no doubt: the kind, for instance, that causes him to describe himself as a horse-breeder, leaving off his author biographies the fact that he used to teach literature. Pretending (even while producing a book that owes plenty to unreflective literary convention) that he has no literary pretensions, Frazier studs his book with allusions to the Greek classics not merely to make sure nobody misses that he’s retelling the Odyssey but also to tell us — in a sad little way — that he secretly thinks we should think he ranks up there with Homer. All that’s no reason we should share the author’s pretensions, however, and in its own league, Cold Mountain is actually very, very good.

Nonetheless, a critical backlash has set in against the book in recent weeks. At its first publication in June, Frazier’s novel received the generally mild reviews typically accorded publishers’ mid-list books and found the small regional success in the South that Atlantic Monthly Press doubtless had as its highest aspiration. Cold Mountain, however, never quite made its expected drift off to the remainder bins. One reader kept telling another to read it, George Will used his widely syndicated political column on September 1 to applaud it, and a national fever for the novel took hold.

As long as bestsellers are pure pulp in the class of Harold Robbins and The Valley of the Dolls, reviewers usually ignore them or write only about the decadent pleasures of slumming in them. And as long as semi- literary historical novels don’t top the sales charts, reviewers usually praise them faintly (as Alfred Kazin nodded at Cold Mountain in the New York Review of Books). But superbestsellerdom, when combined with enough bookishness to make average readers imagine that they’ve just read a piece of serious literature, seems to bring out the sternest instincts of critics: highbrow is fine, and lowbrow is fun, but the successful middlebrow must be swatted down.

So National Review (in a generally sympathetic essay) recently derided Frazier for sounding “the way novelists sound when they sound like novelists.” The Washington Times (in an utterly dismissive column) snorted that Inman is “not your average Confederate soldier, you see. He’s an Indian medicine man with all the latest Indian styles from Haight-Ashbury.” The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times all left the book off their yearend round-ups of 1997’s best fiction. Noticing its lack of quotation marks, thinned-down prose, and backwoods setting, Kirkus Reviews called Cold Mountain “refried Cormac McCarthy” (which is fair enough, so long as one remembers that McCarthy — tired of selling only thirty-eight copies of books that critics compared to William Faulkner’s — had already refried himself to produce his 1992 bestseller, All the Pretty Horses).

Like an advanced-engineering expert brought in to mock a homerepair project, any well-trained critic who examines the book too closely is bound to find flaws in Cold Mountain: bumpy joins, rickety framing, exposed wiring, maybe even that Frazier built a second-story to his novel and forgot to build a stairway to it.

Writing for the on-line journal Slate, the New Republic’s fiction critic James Wood was exactly right to notice the novel’s “writing-school style,” “literary approximation of an already literary idea of reality,” and creaky alternation of Odysseus/Penelope chapters about Inman and Ada: “She waits; he travels.” But Wood was exactly wrong to conclude that Cold Mountain “is like a cemetery with no bodies in it. All the records of life are there, the facts and figures and pocket histories, pointing up out of the ground, but what’s buried there was never alive.” Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

In fact, hardly anyone has gotten Cold Mountain quite right. The simple truth is that Frazier has produced a perfectly enjoyable piece of sentimental fiction, straight from those golden days of the 1950s when there flourished in America such guardians of middlebrow taste as Clifton Fadiman, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and the Book-of-the-Month Club. In the careful design of its almost blueprinted sentimentality, Cold Mountain betrays some serious cold-bloodedness. But then Love Story betrayed even more — as did, for that matter, such middlebrow classics as Shane and Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 The Last Hurrah. (It may be the most devastating criticism of The Bridges of Madison County to suggest that its author wasn’t being cold-blooded, but actually meant it.)

Of course, for all his 1950s-style middlebrow success, Frazier puts in his novel plenty of uniquely 1990s asides. At one point, Cold Mountain makes a smug little gesture at female masturbation, and the book is capable of the historical knowingness of describing “dipped Baptists” on one page and the historical unknowingness of calling Christ’s Resurrection “his culture’s central narrative” on the page before.

The novelist is good when his characters describe war, but he is terrible when they theorize about it: dismissing as equally “despots” the northern soldiers and the southern slaveholders, and accusing Robert E. Lee — of all people — of thinking that military might makes moral right. With his brave deserter, Frazier gets to have it both ways: Inman fleeing defeat is somehow the same as Odysseus returning from victory. The Civil War is almost over anyway, and Inman has merely decided in his ahistorical way to make a separate peace — and just in case anyone might think him a coward, the author has him kill three Yankee raiders who must deserve killing because they’ve threatened a sickly little baby and brave little woman he met along the road.

And yet, even if Frazier is untrustworthy on women, religion, and war — even if he is willing to violate his novel’s historical accuracy for the sake of saying today’s socially correct thing about them — the question remains: So what? What novelist nowadays is entirely trustworthy on women, religion, and war?

If there’s a clue in the way he keeps stepping on his retelling of the Odyssey — hiding it behind long descriptions of made-up Cherokee spirituality and woodsman’s lore — then Frazier probably doesn’t particularly care about his own classic, mythopoetic story. What he probably intends readers to take away from his book is his two heroines’ spunky proto- feminism and all his NewAgey nonsense about the hundredyear-old Indian goat woman and his hero’s will to fight no more forever.

What authors intend for their books, however, is not what matters. Arthur Corian Doyle hated his creation, Sherlock Holmes — first trying to kill him off and then transmuting him (from a man who, in the early stories, didn’t even know that the earth moves around the sun) into a seamless opsimath who knows everything from medieval music to the inner lives of bees. None of it managed to destroy his character. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes does not belong in the same class as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or even Charles Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick, of course, any more than Frazier’s Inman ranges anywhere near Homer’s Odysseus. But he manages nonetheless to live, and that is the definition of the mythopoetic.

And besides, great middlebrow fiction isn’t about such asides. It’s about a storyteller telling over again, in a way contemporary readers will accept, one of that small handful of real stories — like A girl met a boy, or A stranger came to town, or, best of all, There was a man, a long, long way from home.

J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.