Frazier, Charles: Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain
Writer: Charles Frazier
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 449
I got this book shortly after I saw the movie back in 2003. In truth, I wasn’t a big fan of the movie, and got the book thinking that it would illuminate the story I saw on the big screen. I started reading as soon as I bought it, got bored, and put the book away.
What made me pick it up again? For one, I wanted to liberate the bookmark that’d been prisoner for three years. :) But one of my new year's resolutions was to finish reading all the books I’d started prior to that year. While I’m falling woefully short of completing that task, I am trying, and decided to give Cold Mountain another go.
I’ve always liked the Southern Literature I’ve read. When done well, it captures the haunted feel of the land and that haunting will reverberate through you the entire read and beyond. So other than my dislike of the movie, I had no prejudices against this book at all. In fact, I wanted the book to strip the movie, outshine it even. I wanted to see what was so special.
Sadly, I fail to see it. Since I originally only got 68 pages into the book, I started from the beginning and read straight through. It was a chore. So much of a chore that the book committed the imitative fallacy: as the characters’ lives trudged along, so did the book. That’s agony.
But before anyone dismisses me as being harsh, or unable to “get” it, I feel the need to clarify: for starters, save for a few turns of phrase, this book is not written well. Technically speaking, the chapters are horribly inconsistent in length (the second chapter is fifty pages to the first chapter’s twenty), which kept me off balance in terms of pacing my reading. And rather than breaking up the prose with bits of dialogue and short sentences, we have long chunks of paragraphs full of introspection and memory and description. When there is dialogue, Frazier does the “artsy” thing by NOT USING QUOTATION MARKS.
For the love of everything pure and good, what is WITH this trend? I have yet to see it in fiction where the lack of quotations do ANYTHING save for annoy the hell out of me.
But there’s more to my ire than just that. Not only is it difficult to separate the dialogue from the exposition at times, but half the dialogue itself is summarized, like all the actions of the book. He said such and such and she said such and such. They talked of such and such. You know that writing workshop rule about showing and not telling? Someone needs to hit Frazier’s head with that hammer until he bleeds showing over telling. And I’m not kidding. As someone who enjoys telling (especially in the first person, but this was not the case for this book), and understands that telling is needed in certain instances, I can safely say that a whole book told is not a book: it’s just an overblown synopsis.
To be fair, there are some nice moments: Ruby and Ada’s competition with the braids, Ada’s final letter to Inman, the goat-woman, Sara's situation. Some of the details are so right on they’re lovely. And the end of the book, when Ada and Inman are finally reunited, we get some heart to an otherwise dry and distant story. And for my money, Ada’s story of growing up was far more compelling than Inman’s journey home.
But this is not a love story, not like it’s touted. The movie creates more of a love story that’s in these pages, and while the ending makes it more of a love story than not, it’s not the core of what drives the book. Actually, there's not much that drives this book at all. And while I like and appreciate the parallels to Homer’s Odyssey, I don’t find it to be the “American Odyssey” that critics praise it as. Homer’s prose is more interesting than this, folks, as are his adventures.
In terms of setting and description, the symbols and metaphor, all of this fell flat. In this reader’s case, for such things to work there must be an active interest on both the writer’s part and the character’s part in what’s going on. And it’s hard to have an active interest in a writing style that’s so dull and characters who are looking for signs themselves, giving you the metaphor instead of letting it fester in your head until the truth dawns on you. And in terms of setting, this is nothing new to me: I know the Appalachian Mountains because I’ve lived here all my life. Sitting down and reading detail after detail about them wastes my time. It may be wonderful those people unfamiliar with the area, and maybe it’s wonderful for some people who are, but not me.
I wanted some heart out of this book, and heart was something I never, ever got. The potential was there, but it never got fleshed out in a way that would be satisfying to this reader.
I can’t say I’d recommend this, except to say that if you’re genuinely interested in the story itself, watch the movie, because it’s a very faithful adaptation, and Renee Zellweger is wonderful as Ruby. However, if you’re interested in the writing (or if you just love reading rich, detailed description), read a sample of this on Amazon.com before you buy. I think that for me, this was a case where I should’ve read the book before the movie or not at all. But I had it, so I’ve read it, and now I’m passing it on to someone I hope enjoys it more than me.
Time to read something a little more fun and light-hearted…