'Thirteen Moons' waxes and wanes

For lovers of literary fiction, for lovers of romance, for lovers of 19th-century America and for lovers of a great, gorgeous story, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain was a spectacular find.

Here was an instant 20th-century classic that came out of nowhere -- from a middle-aged novelist making his debut -- that went on to become a best seller and win the National Book Award. (Forget the movie version with poor, bedraggled Confederate deserter Jude Law tromping home to Nicole Kidman, only to find her improbably wrapped in a designer coat in the snowy North Carolina woods.)

Now Frazier has returned after a nine-year absence with his second novel, Thirteen Moons.

It seems blasphemous to even consider the possibility of a sophomore slump for a writer as hugely talented and important as Frazier. But comparisons are inevitable, in no small part because Frazier invites them.

Like Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons is set in 19th-century North Carolina. Like Cold Mountain, it's a love story -- although the love object is a lot more slippery than Ada Monroe. And like Cold Mountain, it's about a changing America, an elegy to the loss of a beloved way of life. Even the dust jackets, with their misty images of distant mountains, are similar.

But there are also significant differences, which give Thirteen Moons its own distinct and sometimes magical life.

Gone is the omniscient narrator of Cold Mountain, who like a hawk followed the riveting, dangerous journey of Inman back to his true love. In its place is the first-person voice of orphaned Will Cooper, who as Thirteen Moons opens is an old man baffled by a new invention (the telephone) who has decided it's time to tell the story of his life.

And so Will takes us back to the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson is president and Cherokee Indians populate the Carolina mountains. Will's lifelong adventure begins at age 12, when his aunt and uncle cast him out to be a "bound boy" until he's 18. He's clever and well read, and he runs a trading post near Cherokee territory.

Here he encounters two Indians who change his life: Featherstone, a plantation owner who can pass for white, and Bear, a gentle, traditional chief who's right out of Little Big Man. Bear "adopts" Will, who becomes a lawyer and fights the Jackson-ordered "Removal" of the Cherokees.

Will is loosely based on a real man (William Holland Thomas), and the history lesson in Thirteen Moons is fascinating and moving. Frazier is at his most powerful as a nature writer, and scenes in the forests and mountains where the Indians live are beautifully written.

It's a Garden of Eden for young Will, who randily romps in the woods with Claire Featherstone, the mysteriously elusive love of his life.

Claire (is she Featherstone's daughter?) is forbidden fruit, something forever slipping away from Will, just as the "old ways" are disappearing in the face of so-called progress.

Incredibly, in the 1830s, even the deer are gone from the woods, which have been overhunted by the Indians.

Will Cooper is the ultimate outsider, a white man who belongs nowhere. But he has a sense of humor, which enlivens Thirteen Moons even when he meanders for months on horseback, and the novel (and the reader's attention) wanders.

Despite its melancholy undercurrent, Thirteen Moons is in many ways a warmer novel than the austere Cold Mountain. But without Cold Mountain's perfect structure, Moons becomes an amiable companion in need of an editor.

Frazier's fevered imagination fails him on occasion, too: Few of Will's travels provide the gasp-inducing drama of Inman's odyssey.

And so the verdict. You will find much to admire and savor in Thirteen Moons, but you won't love it like you did Cold Mountain. That may not be fair, but there it is.

Thirteen Moons

By Charles Frazier

Random House, 420 pp., $26.95

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