Through no fault of his own, the North Carolina writer Charles Frazier fell from everybody’s favorite success story to a symbol of the publishing industry’s profligacy. After he came out of nowhere in 1997 to sell millions of copies of a Civil War odyssey called “Cold Mountain,” New York publishers bid like drunken sailors on a one-page outline for Frazier’s second book. Random House trounced all opponents at auction by tossing off an absurd $8 million advance, the kind of money that might have paid for manuscripts from hundreds of promising literary novelists. No one was particularly surprised — though some were fiendishly delighted — when the book Frazier eventually produced, “Thirteen Moons,” received jeering reviews and sold far fewer copies than his debut.
So here we are with Book No. 3, after the whiplash of critical opinion and those incredulous stories of financial misjudgment have faded a bit. Will Frazier’s new novel, “Nightwoods,” redeem his reputation (and his publisher’s faith), or will it only confirm claims that he’s a deep-fat-fried Faulkner who won the lottery on his first time out?
(Random House) - "Nightwoods: A Novel" by Charles Frazier
Sorry, haters, but this is a fantastic book: an Appalachian Gothic with a low-level fever that runs alternately warm and chilling. Frazier has left the 19th century and the picaresque form to produce a cleverly knitted thriller about a tough young woman in the 1960s who has given up on the people of her small town and gone to live alone in the woods. Much of the terror and pleasure of “Nightwoods” comes from detecting the ligaments that connect these wounded folks, who don’t always realize how they’re connected until a knife is already in flight.
For almost three years, Luce has worked as the caretaker for an abandoned summer lodge an hour away from the nearest village. The trip takes only 20 minutes across the lake, but Luce burned her rotten boat on the shore one evening, further evidence that she’s turned away from everyone in favor of a silent, monastic life. Now nothing is more important to her than defending her freedom from the requirements and conveniences of others. (There must be something in the water because she’s an only slightly less rugged version of the young female loner we saw earlier this summer in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “Once Upon a River,” one of my favorite novels of the year.) “What good does the world do you?” Luce asks herself from bitter experience. At night she nestles in the lodge’s voluminous lobby, appointed with “mildew-spotted furniture and tall full bookshelves and huge floor-standing radio with a tuning ring like a steering wheel to a Packard.”
Her melancholy peace is shattered in the opening pages when a social worker drops off her orphaned niece and nephew, twins she’s never met, who are “small and beautiful and violent.” (Don’t leave them alone with the chickens . . . .) Hollywood will inevitably muck up these two kids with sentimentality, but in Frazier’s pages they’re just right: weird and almost feral, unwilling to speak or even make eye contact, just one turn of the screw away from spooky. Intuiting Sartre’s dark truth, they’ve already discovered that “horror is other people.” The state doctor thought they might be feebleminded; they cut themselves and start fires and rock on the porch for hours “looking glazed into the distance.” Caring for self-destructive young trauma victims like this is exhausting and frightening, and Frazier notes that Luce “didn’t even really like the children, much less love them,” but she “didn’t have to love them. She just had to take care of them.” And she does — ferociously.
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