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Nine years in the making, this is the much anticipated follow-up to Frazier's debut novel "Cold Mountain".
From Amazon.Com and Publishers Weekly, here is a write up of the book:
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… a bountiful literary panorama again set primarily in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains. The story takes place mostly before the Civil War this time, and it is epic in scope. 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. In a departure from “Cold Mountain’s” Inman, Will Cooper narrates his own story in retrospect, beginning with his days as an orphaned, literate “bound boy” who is dispatched to run a musty trading post at the edge of the Cherokee Nation. Nearly nine mesmerizing decades later, Will is an eccentric elder of great accomplishments and gargantuan failures, perched cantankerously on his front porch taking potshots at passenger trains rumbling across his property (he owns “quite a few” shares of the railroad). Over the years, Will - modeled very loosely, Frazier acknowledges, on real-life frontiersman William Holland Thomas - becomes a prosperous merchant, a self-taught lawyer and a state senator; he’s adopted by a Cherokee elder and later leads the clan as a white Indian chief; he bears terrible witness to the 1838-1839 Trail of Tears; a quarter-century later, he goes to battle for the Confederacy as a self-anointed colonel, leading a mostly Indian force with a “legion of lawyers and bookkeepers and shop clerks” as officers; as time passes, his life intersects with such figures as Davy Crockett, Sen. John C. Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson. After the Civil War, Will fritters away a fortune through wanderlust, neglect and unquenched longing for his one true love, Claire, a girl he won in a card game when they were both 12, wooed for two erotic summers in his teen years and found again several decades later. In the novel’s wistful coda, recalling Claire’s voice inflicts “flesh wounds of memory, painful but inconclusive”—a voice that an uncertain old Will hears in the static hiss when he answers his newfangled phone in the book’s opening pages.
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It’s funny how some people are reacting to this book. Unfortunately in the literary world, Frazier made a huge splash with “Cold Mountain”. I enjoyed the book, too. But it seems that many haven’t been happy with Frazier’s second offering. The shame of that is that “Thirteen Moons” in some respects is better. Frazier has given us a great first person perspective story that spans many years. He develops Will’s character with such ease it seems, and keeps him consistent. So what is there not to like?
At times it is not exciting to read “Thirteen Moons”. We don’t have Inman running away from a war to get back to the only woman he realizes he loved. And we don’t have the decaying life of Ada, hoping to see her dear Inman again. We are not working to any great goal. All we have is Will’s life. Little and big triumphs and failures, told by the man himself. Sure, it doesn’t move fast at times. And I didn’t find myself clamoring to read the book at times. However, this is a very good piece of literature. If the reader goes in looking for some grand love story, or a chase, then they will be disappointed. They need to sit back and take in Frazier’s prose and development of a grand story.
There is much to enjoy about this book, which I found. And maybe it helped that I heard all the comments about how this book was much less in stature compared to his debut. But sometimes I just think people expect too much.
8/10
