Cold Mountain

by Charles Frazier

[jamiereadthis]

To be honest here, I might not have stuck this one out had it not been set in Western NC. That’s home. It’s never not a delight to read about places and names so familiar. Faint praise with which to damn, there it is.

The way books earn high marks from me are when they are not only books I love, but when they do what they do so well I can’t imagine a way they could be improved. Where, sometimes despite actual flaws, I wouldn’t change word one, I wouldn’t have them any way other than how they are.

On that scale, this might be a negative-five. All I want to do is plead with Frazier to chop it up mercilessly. Scrap the whole first half of the book, start it about page 160. Have Inman shoot Junior at the end of that chapter, nix the flashbacks, dear God nix the limbless, lifeless love story— burn it with fire and never speak of it again— and from there focus only on the very good things: Inman’s journey up the mountain, the natives’ relationship to the land, and Ada, Ruby, and Stobrod (and Georgia boy; because I liked how he was only called Georgia boy). Stop talking about the weather. Wipe the epilogue from existence. Have one protagonist do one thing that is not nobly, flawlessly, aggravatingly virtuous. The end.

As it stands, Cold Mountain only shows promise, ultimately all the more disappointing for its determination to frustrate it. Whoever owned the book before me, though, had pressed leaves, all bright red and gold, in the back pages. I think that went further to win me over than anything.

(And, admittedly, I kept sneaking back over to read The Long Home, which only made the comparison suffer so much more.)