Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier

This magnificent novel by one of America's finest writers is the epic of one man's remarkable journey, set in nineteenth-century America against the background of a vanishing people and a rich way of life. At the age of twelve, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home. In a card game with a white Indian named Featherstone, Will wins - for a brief moment - a mysterious girl named Claire, and his passion and desire for her spans this novel. As Will's destiny intertwines with the fate of the Cherokee Indians - including a Cherokee Chief named Bear - he learns how to fight and survive in the face of both nature and men, and eventually, under the Corn Tassel Moon, Will begins the fight against Washington City to preserve the Cherokee's homeland and culture. And he will come to know the truth behind his belief that only desire trumps time. Brilliantly imagined, written with great power and beauty by a master of American fiction, Thirteen Moons is a stunning novel about a man's passion for a woman, and how loss, longing and love can shape a man's destiny over the many moons of a life. From the Hardcover edition. Editorial Reviews From Bookmarks Magazine Critics voiced great expectations for Thirteen Moons, coming nearly ten years after Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning Cold Mountain (1997). Unfortunately, this second novel fails to achieve the same uniform critical acclaim. Certainly, similarities between the two books abound, including a deep appreciation for the Southern Appalachian landscape, a protagonist embarking on a life-defining odyssey, an elegiac tone, and swatches of excellent prose. Here, Frazier frames Will's story against America's transition from a frontier society into an industrial nation. Despite some praise, reviewers generally agree that Thirteen Moons is an airier production (New York Times), with perhaps more clichés, less convincing characterizations and relationships, and a less wieldy plot. What critics do agree on, however, is the excellent period detail and research that makes Frazier a first-rate chronicler of American history. Copyright 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Once in a great while, all of the elements of an audio book come together to create a near-perfect experience for the listener. Frazier's follow-up to his 1997 National Book Award-winner, Cold Mountain, is another saga of enduring love. It's no small gift to work with great material, and Patton transforms the text into a tale that sounds as if it were meant to be read aloud. It's a story to be told by the fire over the course of a long winter, just as the narrator Will Cooper and his adoptive Cherokee father, Bear, swap yarns while they are hunkered down until the end of the snow season. Patton's voice has an unidentifiable Southern lilt, which nicely fits a novel vaguely set in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Patton makes the correct choice not to individualize each character's voice as this is so much Cooper's tale. Bluegrass melodies played by Ryan Scott and Christina Courtin enhance the production. The CDs have been thoughtfully designed, with the numbers circling each disc like a moon. This attention to detail makes for a beautiful production of a love story that listeners will not put down and will want to replay. Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist In one of the most anticipated novels of the current publishing season, Frazier, author of the widely applauded Cold Mountain (1997), remains true to the historical fiction vein. The author's second outing finds grounding in a timeless theme: a grand old man remembering his glory days. As a teenager during the James Monroe administration, Will Cooper is sent off, in an indentured situation, into the wilderness of the Indian Nation to run a trading post. From a mixed-race Indian, he wins a girl with whom he will be besotted for the rest of his life, and his passion will extend into personal involvement in Indian affairs, to the highest level of politics. Thus Frazier also remains faithful to the theme of his previous novel: the odyssey, especially one man's path through trials and tribulations to be by the side of the woman he loves. And he remains faithful to a method that marked Cold Mountain in readers' memories: a proliferation of detail about customs and costumes, about food and recreation--pretty much what everything looked and smelled like. Unfortunately, for the first fourth of the book, there is too much detail for the plot to easily bear. But, finally, the characters are able to step out from behind this blanket of particulars and incidentals and make the story work. Expect considerable demand, of course. Brad Hooper Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review Gorgeous...Thirteen Moons calls Cold Mountain to mind in its wonder at the natural world; its pacificist undercurrents; its dismay at the dismantling of what matters, and its convication that one love, no matter how tortured and inexplicable, can be life-defining...fascinating...vivid and alive. -Newsweek Thirteen Moons brings this vanished world thrillingly to life... One of the great Native American, and American stories, and a great gift to all of us, from one of our very best writers. -Kirkus Reviews, starred review There are things so masterful words can't do them justice. Frazier's writing falls in that category...With Thirteen Moons, he's doing important work filling in the gaps, helping restore the roots, of our knowledge of our own history. -Asheville Citizen-Times Fascinating...Reading Thirteen Moons is an intoxicating experience...This is 21st-century literary fiction at its very best. -BookPage Thirteen Moons is rare in many ways and occupies a literary plane of such height that reviewing it is not really salient....Thirteen Moons has the power to inspire great performances from succeeding generations of writers....For those who simply value the literary experience, Thirteen Moons will provide the immense satisfaction of taking a literary journey of magnitude. Whether on a plane, in an office or curled in a window seat, readers who absorb Will's story will find their own lives enriched....Thirteen Moons belongs to the ages. -Los Angeles Times Magical...the history lesson in Thirteen Moons is fascinating and moving...You will find much to admire and savor in Thirteen Moons. -USA Today Verdict: A powerhouse second act....a brilliant success...Frazier's second act should convince everyone that he's here to stay. It is a powerful, dramatic, often surprising and memorable novel. -Atlanta Journal Constitution Thirteen Moons is a boisterous, confident novel that draws from the epic tradition... Frazier is a natural storyteller, and throughout his picaresque tale are grand themes and eulogies -Boston Globe Warm hearted...Frazier is a remarkably meticulous and tasteful writer...Thirteen Moons is a worthy successor to the first novel and a highly readable book. -Seattle Times To Charles Frazier, words are playthings. Like very few other contemporary American novelists, he puts them together in such a way that they can transform an otherwise mundane moment, scene or conversation into one that is transcendent....No sophomore jinx here. Reading a Frazier novel is like listening to a fine symphony. He's a maestro whose pen is his baton, beckoning the best that each sentence has to offer. And just as you wouldn't rush a conductor, you should take the time to savor Frazier's work, to take in each thought, to relish the turn of phrase or the imagery of a craftsman. -Denver Post Two for two...Here is a book brimming with vivid, adventurous incident...Charles Frazier set himself a daunting challenge with this book. He set out to write a historical novel that was retrospective and meditative, yet still vibrant and immediate with life. Thirteen Moons succeeds in classy fashion. -Raleigh News & Observer If current fiction is anything to go by, it's hard for a novelist to make Santayana's puzzle pieces - lyricism, comedy, tragedy - fit together, as they do in real life and real history. Frazier has done it...Thirteen Moons makes you feel that change that happened so long before our own time, and makes you mourn it. -Newsday Thirteen Moons is a fitting successor to Cold Mountain...fans of Frazier's debut will be cheered to discover that the new book is another compulsively readable work of historical fiction. -St. Louis Post-Dispatch If there is any doubt that Frazier is an incredibly gifted storyteller - and not just a lucky name or a one-hit wonder - it will be put to rest with the publication of Thirteen Moons. Within 10 pages, this long-awaited new novel bears the reader swiftly out of the waking world into its own imagined universe like nothing else published this year. -Minneapolis Star Tribune Forget the sophomore jinx. Frazier demonstrates that Cold Mountain was no one-hit wonder with this fully realized historical novel again set in the South....Again, Frazier shows himself a master of landscape and language, both often fresh and surprising in his telling. -Seattle Post-Intelligencer Thirteen Moons contains achingly beautiful passages of snowfalls, fog-wrapped rivers and moonlit forests. There are ribald and hilarious events, too, including a description of the Cherokee Booger Dance that is a masterpiece of satire. The love affair between Cooper and Claire threads its way through this pseudo-historic epic like a brilliant, scarlet ribbon. There is also a melancholy refrain that celebrates a wondrous time and place that is gone and will never return. -Smoky Mountain News Fiction of the highest order...Another indelible character. Charles Frazier has a knack for them. -Charlotte Observer What a story!... Frazier's creation, Will Cooper, is utterly charismatic....Frazier's genius lies in his ability to convey emotions that feel pure and genuine...It was worth the wait. -Dayton Daily News From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Charles Frazier grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international bestseller, and won the National Book Award in 1997. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From The Washington Post Charles Frazier is an intelligent, occasionally witty author who writes incredibly long-winded, sentimental, soporific novels. His first, Cold Mountain, published nine years ago, was the most unlikely bestseller since Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989), by his fellow North Carolinian Allan Gurganus, and the most improbable National Book Award winner since John O'Hara's Ten North Frederick half a century ago. Now Frazier weighs in with Thirteen Moons, which manages to be even longer and even duller than Cold Mountain. No doubt it too will be a huge bestseller. That Frazier's success parallels Gurganus's is purely coincidental, but it's just about impossible not to remark upon the oddness of the coincidence. As a rule, the American book-buying public has only a limited appetite for Southern-fried fiction, yet Frazier and Gurganus somehow have tapped into it. They deal (Frazier somewhat more skillfully than Gurganus) in what a North Carolina newspaper editor of my long-ago acquaintance used to call shucks-'n'-nubbins, which is loosely defined as tiny ears of corn. Frazier's corn is anything but tiny -- more than 400 pages of it in the case of Thirteen Moons -- but it's corn all the same. Reading Frazier is like sitting by the cracker barrel for hour after hour and listening to an amiable but impossibly gassy guy who talks real slow, says I reckon a whole lot and never shuts up. His novels have little structure and not much in the way of plot; in Cold Mountain he gave us the wounded Confederate soldier, Inman, limping his way back to his gal, Ada, in the North Carolina mountains, and in Thirteen Moons it's the ancient Will Cooper reminiscing about his nine decades and his Cherokee buddies and the gal, Claire, whom he managed to love and lose. He is a far less interesting man than Frazier obviously believes him to be, which is a little surprising because he's based on a very interesting historical figure. Will Cooper is not William Holland Thomas, Frazier says in an author's note, and then coyly adds, though they do share some DNA. Actually, they share a whole lot. William Holland Thomas was born in North Carolina in 1805, was almost immediately orphaned, worked as a boy in a general store in the mountains, taught himself the law, worked to secure the right of the Cherokees to remain in their territory as Andrew Jackson sought to drive all Indians westward, served in the state senate and organized a company of Cherokee soldiers on behalf of the Confederacy. All of which is exactly what Will Cooper does in Thirteen Moons; where fact and fiction part is that Thomas married and had children while Cooper remains single, and Thomas's mental condition gradually deteriorated after the Civil War while Cooper remains alert, if rather tired, to the novel's end. In other words, in Thirteen Moons Frazier essentially has fictionalized history. Nothing wrong with that: happens all the time. But the novel provides less imagination and invention than readers are likely to expect; it reads more like a dutifully researched (check out that author's note) graduate school paper than a work of fiction. It also is chock-a-block with homespun aphorisms that aren't exactly full of original wisdom: One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time, and Grief is a haunting, and Writers can tell any lie that leaps into their heads, and Our worst pain is confined within our own skin, and We are not made strong enough to stand up against endless grief, and so forth. To be sure Frazier's folksy wisdom is a good deal easier to swallow than Gurganus's, but it's folksy all the same and not especially wise. The novel is narrated in the first person. Early on, Will tells us that I was always word-smitten and that he kept journals for years, though the novel obviously is a reconstruction of the journals rather than the journals themselves. It begins with the bound boy that Will became at the age of 12, when his uncle and aunt sent him off to be a shopkeep for seven years, apprenticed to an elderly gentleman who owned a trade post out at the edge of the [Cherokee] Nation. He makes his way through the mountain forests on his own, encountering adventures similar to those that beset Inman in Cold Mountain -- Frazier does like to send his men out on interminable treks that often seem to be headed nowhere -- until he finally arrives at the store, which was hardly bigger than the parlor room of my aunt's house and provided with woefully little . . . stock from the outer world. Will is a go-getter, though, and soon enough the store is busy, at least by mountain standards. Will runs it for four years, then is able to buy it after the owner's death. By this point, he has become something of a fixture in the Indian community, especially after he befriends an old Indian named Bear, possessor of the deepest and sharpest mind to which I have ever been exposed. At once the reader is in the presence of the Noble Savage, though a bit later Frazier tries to wriggle out of that one: It is tempting to look back at Bear's people from the perspective of this modern world and see them as changeless and pure, authentic people in ways impossible for anybody to be anymore. We need Noble Savages for our own purposes. Our happy imaginings about them and the pure world they occupied do us good when incoherent change overwhelms us. But even in those early days when I was first getting to know Bear and his people, I could see that change and brutal loss had been all they had experienced for two centuries. . . . It was not any kind of original people left. No wild Indians at all, and little raw wilderness. They were damaged people, and they lived in a broken world like everybody else. True enough, but it's also true that Frazier sentimentalizes the Cherokee even as he tries to keep his distance from the Noble Savage cliché. When Bear offers to stand as your father -- i.e., to step in for the father whom Will lost before he was born -- it's a true Noble Savage Moment: If you were born or adopted into a clan, you were Cherokee. Everybody else was an outsider. So when Bear made his offer it was not only between him and me, it was also a deal with his whole people and thus a matter of identity. For them and for me and for him. Or, as Annie Oakley puts it in Annie Get Your Gun, I'm an Indian Too. Corny? Absolutely. It had best be acknowledged, though, that Frazier's sentimental streak is almost certainly what has gotten him to where he is. It comes naturally to him, and readers seem to recognize this. However one may feel about the books that make their way to the upper reaches of the fiction bestseller lists, one thing is true of just about all of them: They are written with the utmost sincerity. Their authors mean what they write. They aren't trying to jerk readers around, and they aren't condescending to them. Readers can sense when they're being patronized, and they rarely fall for it. Whatever else there is to be said about Frazier's fiction -- and in my view there's not much -- its sincerity is unimpeachable. Which makes it doubly odd that he tries to have it both ways. In Cold Mountain, after Inman and Ada have their ecstatic and endlessly delayed reunion, Frazier pulls up short by killing Inman off in the closing paragraphs. Something similar (though scarcely as violent) happens between Will and Claire toward the end of Thirteen Moons. Even as Frazier is tugging away at our heartstrings, he's trying to show how tough and realistic he can be, but it feels strained and unpersuasive; my own hunch is that he thinks literary respectability can be earned only if sentimentality is served up with a hard-hearted twist, but it's the sentimentality that's believable, not the twist. Will readers flock to Thirteen Moons as they did to Cold Mountain? Who knows? Frazier's new publisher has a ton of money invested in him and will be pulling out all the stops. One thing is certain: Thirteen Moons is going to be putting a whole bunch of people to sleep. Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 PART ONE ... bone moon 1 There is no scatheless rapture. love and time put me in this condition. I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. We're called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and a dark way getting there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end. The belief I've acquired over a generous and nevertheless inadequate time on earth is that we arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we departed from the world. But, on the other hand, I've always enjoyed a journey. Cloudy days, I sit by the fire and talk nothing but Cherokee. Or else I sit silent with pen and paper, rendering the language into Sequoyah's syllabary, the characters forming under my hand like hen- scratch hieroglyphs. On sunny days, I usually rock on the porch wrapped in a blanket and read and admire the vista. Many decades ago, when I built my farm out of raw land, I oriented the front of the house to aim west toward the highest range of mountains. It is a grand long view. The river and valley, and then the coves and blue ridges heaved up and ragged to the limits of eyesight. Bear and I once owned all the landscape visible from my porch and a great deal more. People claimed that in Old Europe our holdings would have been enough land to make a minor country. Now I have just the one little cove opening onto the river. The hideous new railroad, of which I own quite a few shares, runs through my front yard. The black trains come smoking along twice a day, and in the summer when the house windows are open, the help wipes the soot off the horizontal faces of furniture at least three times a week. On the other side of the river is a road that has been there as some form of passway since the time of elk and buffalo, both long since extinguished. Now, mules drawing wagons flare sideways in the traces when automobiles pass. I saw a pretty one go by the other day. Yellow as a canary and trimmed with polished brass. It had a windshield like an oversized monocle, and it went ripping by at a speed that must have been close to a mile a minute. The end of the driver's red scarf flagged straight out behind him, three feet long. I hated the racket and the dust that hung in the air long after the automobile was gone. But if I was twenty, I'd probably be trying to find out where you buy one of those fast bastards. the night has become electrified. Midevening, May comes to my room. The turn of doorknob, click of bolt in hasp. The opening door casts a wedge of yellow hall light against the wall. Her slender dark hand twists the switch and closes the door. Not a word spoken. The brutal light is message enough. A clear glass bulb hangs in the center of the room from a cord of brown woven cloth. New wires run down the wall in an ugly metal conduit. The bare bulb's little blazing filament burns an angry cloverleaf shape onto my eyeballs that will last until dawn. It's either get up and shut off the electricity and light a candle to read by, or else be blinded. I get up and turn off the light. May is foolish enough to trust me with matches. I set fire to two tapers and prop a polished tin pie plate to reflect yellow light. The same way I lit book pages and notebook pages at a thousand campfires in the last century. I'm reading The Knight of the Cart, a story I've known since youth. Lancelot is waiting where I left him the last time. Still every bit as anguished and torn about whether to protect his precious honor or to climb onto the shameful cart with the malefic dwarf driver, and perhaps by doing so to save Guinevere, perhaps have Guinevere for his own true love. Choosing incorrectly means losing all. I turn the pages and read on, hoping Lancelot will choose better if given one more chance. I want him to claim love over everything, but so far he has failed. How many more chances will I be able to give him? The gist of the story is that even when all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time. A bedtime drink would be helpful. At some point in life, everybody needs medication to get by. A little something to ease the pain, smooth the path forward. But my doctor prohibits liquor, and so my own home has become as strict as if it were run by hard-shell Baptists. Memory is about the only intoxicant left. I read on into the night until the house falls quiet. Lancelot is hopeless. I am dream-stricken to think he will ever choose better. At some point, I put the book down and hold my right palm to the light. The silver scar running diagonal across all the deep lines seems to itch, but scratching does not help. Late in the night, the door opens again. Scalding metallic light pours in from the hallway. May enters and walks to my bed. Her skin is the color of tanned deerhide, a mixture of several bloods-white and red and black-complex enough to confound those legislators who insist on naming every shade down to the thirty-second fraction. Whatever the precise formula is for May, it worked out beautifully. She's too pretty to be real. I knew her grandfather back in slavery days. Knew him and also owned him, if I'm to tell the truth. I still wonder why he didn't cut my throat some night while I was asleep. I'd have had it coming. All us big men would have. But through some unaccountable generosity, May is as kind and protective as her grandfather was. May takes the book as from a sleepy child, flaps it face down on the nightstand, blows out the candle with a moist breath, full lips pursed and shaped like a bow. I hear a hint of rattle in the lungs as the breath expires. I worry for her, though my doctor says she is fine. Consumption, though, is a long way to die. I've seen it happen more than once. May steps back to the door and is a black spirit shape against the light, like a messenger in a significant dream. -Sleep, Colonel. You've read late. Funny thing is, I actually try. I lie flat on my back in the dark with my arms on my chest. But I can't sleep. It is a bitter-cold night and the fire has burnt down to hissing coals. I don't ever sleep well anymore. I lie in bed in the dark and let the past sweep over me like stinging sheets of windblown rain. My future is behind me. I let gravity take me into the bed and before long I'm barely breathing. Practicing for the Nightland. survive long enough and you get to a far point in life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen. After that, if you don't watch out, you can spend all your time tallying your losses and gains in endless narrative. All you love has fled or been taken away. Everything fallen from you except the possibility of jolting and unforewarned memory springing out of the dark, rushing over you with the velocity of heartbreak. May walking down the hall humming an old song-The Girl I Left Behind Me-or the mere fragrance of clove in spiced tea can set you weeping and howling when all you've been for weeks on end is numb. At least that last one is explainable. Back in green youth, Claire became an advocate for flavored kisses. She would break off new spring growth at the end of a birch twig, peel the dark bark to the wet green pulp, and fray the fibers with her thumbnail-then put the twig in her mouth and hold it there like a cheroot. After a minute she'd toss it away and say, Now kiss me. And her mouth had the sweet sharp taste of birch. In summer, she did the same with the clear drop of liquid at the tip of honeysuckle blossoms, and in the fall with the white pulp of honey-locust pods. And in winter with a dried clove and a broken stick of cinnamon. Now kiss me. at may's urging, I recently agreed to buy an Edison music machine. The Fireside model. It cost an unimaginable twenty-two dollars. She tells me the way it works is that singers up North holler songs into an enormous metal cone, whereupon their voices are scarified in a thin gyre on a wax cylinder the size of a bean can. I imagine the singers looking as if they are being swallowed by a bear. After digestion, they come out of my corresponding little cone sounding tiny and earnest and far, far away. May is relentlessly modern, which makes me wonder why she takes care of me, for I am resolutely antique. Her enthusiasm for the movies is beyond measure, though the nearest nickelodeon is half a day's train ride away. Sometimes I give her a few dollars for the train ticket and the movie ticket, with some money left over for dinner along the way. She comes back all excited and full of talk about the thrill of the compact narratives, the inhuman beauty of certain actresses and actors, the magnitude of the images. I have never witnessed a movie other than once in Charleston, when I dropped a nickel into the slot of a kinetoscope viewer and wound the crank until the bell rang and put the sound tubes like a stethoscope to my ears and then bent to the eyepieces. All I perceived were senseless blurs moving tiny across my mind. I could not adjust my eyes to the pictures. Something looked a little like a man, but he seemed to have a dozen arms and legs and seemed not to occupy any specific world at all but just a grey fog broken by looming vague shapes. For all I could determine of his surroundings, the man might have been playing baseball or plowing a cornfield, or maybe boxing in a ring. I lost interest in the movies at that point. But I understand that a movie has been made about my earlier life, and May described it to me in enthusiastic detail after it played in the nearest town. The title of it is The White Chief. I didn't care to see it. Who wants every bit of life you've ever known boiled down to a few short minutes? I don't need prompting. Memories from those way-back times flash up with gr... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From AudioFile Charles Frazier's combination of poetic prose and cracker-barrel plainness is tailor-made for Will Patton's familiar folksy voice. Patton plunges listeners into the life of frontiersman Will Cooper, the aged, cantankerous narrator. Patton shines as Cooper reflects on the natural world and somewhat reluctantly tells the story of his life from bound-boy to lawyer, from senator to white Indian chief experiencing the demise of the Cherokee Nation. Frazier's period diction and sense of place are uncanny, but stock characters and his romanticized vision become obstacles. Happily, Patton avoids falling into the bad soldier/good Indian stereotype. His inflections create subtlety and human dimension on both sides. The book is good. Will Patton's performance is better. S.J.H. AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.