Life after 'Cold Mountain'

The writer had flown across the Atlantic Ocean to Romania, despite his strenuous opposition to having the film of his novel shot there instead of the United States.

He soon found himself sitting in the living room of a perfect replication of a Civil War homestead in North Carolina. And then suddenly into the room walked the character he had created, Ada Monroe, a stunning vision of Southern loveliness in the person of actress Nicole Kidman. He had to catch his breath.

"That was," the writer says, "the strangest moment of all."

Life has been filled with startling surprises for Charles Frazier ever since "Cold Mountain." His wife, Katherine, had persuaded him that he should quit his English teaching job at North Carolina State University and devote himself fully to the novel he had been trying to write, off and on, for years. It was snapped up by a small publisher and he held out hopes that this retelling of Odysseus' travails set in the Civil War might somehow sell 10,000 copies across the South.

Instead, "Cold Mountain" became the debut novel of dreams, winner of the 1997 National Book Award, a runaway success that spent 61 weeks on The New York Times' best-seller list in hardcover. The book has sold more than 4 million copies and became an Academy Award-winning film by Anthony Minghella.

Readers at his appearances still ask Frazier if he "expected the success of 'Cold Mountain' " and he always tells them, "You would have to be deluded to even begin to imagine that."

Expectations from others now swirl about Frazier, although the 56-year-old North Carolinian remains a model of Southern calm and reserve amid the storm. "Cold Mountain's" stunning success caused a frenzied bidding war for its successor that prompted Random House to pay $8.25 million, an astonishing sum for a literary novel. That was followed by the sale of film rights that brought in another $3 million.

The nine-year wait for the successor to "Cold Mountain" ended on Oct. 3 with publication of Frazier's "Thirteen Moons" (Random House, 420 pages, $26.95). From publishing execs in New York City to readers in Seattle, everyone wondered the same thing: Could Charles Frazier do it again?

"Thirteen Moons" shares many of the same elements that made "Cold Mountain" such a phenomenon. A momentous period of 19th-century American history is brought vividly alive, from the sights and smells of daily life to the looming dangers in the rough landscape, most of it in the Southern Appalachian Mountains where Frazier himself grew up. His second novel also shares the use of archaic language, anti-war underpinnings, as well as a bittersweet love affair as a centerpiece.

But "Thirteen Moons" is not "Cold Mountain 2." Frazier's masterful third-person narrative about a Civil War deserter has been replaced by the idiosyncratic first-person narration of Will Cooper, a man of 90 years who reflects on his eventful life with matter-of-factness and humor.

Trail of Tears

Much of it involves his interactions with the Cherokee, which begin as a 12-year-old orphan dispatched by his aunt and uncle to operate a frontier trading post. Cooper's life continues on an unlikely trajectory to a prominent role with the tribe, especially with the Eastern group that remained in Carolina during the forced relocation of most tribal members to Oklahoma, the infamous Trail of Tears.

Reaction to "Thirteen Moons" has been, perhaps inevitably, more muted than to "Cold Mountain." Many critics have praised the new novel with some reservations, but there also have been outright pans. Readers snapped up copies of "Thirteen Moons" so feverishly at the start that it vaulted to the second spot on The New York Times list, but its time near the top proved limited, although the novel has sold more than 200,000 copies, the most of any literary novel during what has been the most powerful fall season in years.

But Frazier is no longer the fresh new thing. Instead, he is "The 8 Million Dollar Man," as Entertainment Weekly put it, an inviting target of criticism and jealousy in this money-obsessed country. His writing now is being judged much like the performance of professional athletes: Do his stats deserve the stratospheric payday?

None of this much concerns Frazier. For one thing, he seldom reads reviews of his work. For another, the last thing he wanted to do with his second novel was a carbon copy of his first.

"Money changed the external pressures on me," Frazier relates in Seattle. "I had to learn that I was guaranteed not to get anything done if I took that into the office with me. I wanted the goals for the new book to be mine, rather than something imposed by that contract. I still wanted a book that I myself could be proud of."

"Thirteen Moons" presented prodigious challenges for its creator. He had stumbled upon a passing historical reference to a white man in a mental institution speaking Cherokee during his research for "Cold Mountain" and he had filed it away for future consideration with so many other possibilities in his notebooks. "Who was that guy?" continued to bedevil him.

The white man who spoke Cherokee turned out to be William Holland Thomas, a figure of some historical prominence. Frazier, who would rather research than write, plowed in, reading a Thomas biography, as well as some of Thomas' notebooks. It took him some time to finally recognize that all this research into Thomas "was not helping." He was writing a novel, after all.

What form that novel should take was also vexing. Frazier tried starting the tale in the mental institution, using third-person narration. But his Will Cooper character based on Thomas seemed to have a mind of his own and "definitely did not want to be institutionalized."

"Draft after draft was thrown out," Frazier relates. "I kept coming back to that 12-year-old boy facing unknown territory -- that was what hooked me."

The writing finally started to flow, but Frazier is a painstaking writer, slow of pace. The May 2005 deadline for submission of his manuscript to Random House was going to require an entirely different approach than he used with "Cold Mountain."

"I soon recognized that deadline meant I had better work every day," Frazier recalls. "I found that if I take two or three days off, then it takes two or three days to get back up to speed. So for two years, I only took Christmas Day off, not even Christmas Eve."

Whether such a frenzied approach to writing was beneficial to "Thirteen Moons" remains a worthy question but Frazier felt he had no other option. As he puts it, "I realized that Random House was serious about the deadline. Plus, I'm an old teacher who was always serious about deadlines: I had held many of my students' feet to the fire over that."

Frazier got his manuscript to Random House on the day before his deadline. But the challenges did not end then.

As soon as he received bound galley proofs of "Thirteen Moons," Frazier delivered 30 copies to the elders of the neighboring Cherokee Tribe and requested a meeting with them in a couple of weeks to discuss the book. Cherokee characters enliven the narrative of the novel, producing some of its most memorable scenes, often with outrageous behavior and humor, especially with a chief named Bear who is mentor to Cooper.

"I wanted to write about Bear in the same way as any other character," Frazier says. "I did not want to be one of those white writers who treat Native Americans as category he doesn't want to touch."

Frazier had some trepidation about how the elders would react to his portrayal of Native Americans in his novel, but he felt they deserved an early warning "before journalists started asking them what they thought of the book."

"I wanted them to know what my intentions were," Frazier recalls. "What I said to them is that I grew up a few miles from here and my ancestors have been in this area for 250 years, although their people have certainly been here far longer. I also said that my people were occupying their land. But my approach as a writer was to tell our story together on this land.

"Lastly, I told them that this book would get a certain amount of attention, but that I would do what I could to redirect that if they disagreed with my approach to the book. The elders could not have been more generous in their response."

Frazier now is involved in paying for a dual English-Cherokee edition of "Thirteen Moons" after the elders told him that the dying out of the Cherokee language is one of their gravest concerns. The novel's section on the forced removal already has been translated as a start, the first contemporary work translated into Cherokee in 175 years.

Frazier is hopeful that it may eventually lead to more translations into Cherokee, including such children's classics as Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are." That would surely be of more interest to young Cherokees than the 19th-century translations of the Bible, some hymnals and the tribal newspaper, the sum total of available translations until now.

Frazier plans a well-deserved respite from writing to enjoy time with his wife of 30 years, a former accounting professor who now handles his financial affairs and accompanies him on book tours. He looks forward to leisurely days and nights at the couple's homes in Asheville, N.C., and Florida where they raise show horses with their daughter Annie, a college student.

Into the 20th century

Frazier's third novel will be set in the 20th century ("I'm done with the 19th"). But it likely will share a setting of "those old round mountains" where he has lived most of his life and where he spends hours on deserted trails on his mountain bike.

Hard rides of more than 30 miles' length over hilly terrain are one of the great passions of his life, along with discovery of indie-music bands, especially when he finds out about them before his daughter and can recommend them first to her (Midlake from Denton, Texas, is his latest such "coup").

Frazier prefers not to discuss the millions that have come his way from "Thirteen Moons," although he recognizes such questions come with that elite territory. But he does say, "I'm not going to pretend that it did not provide a cushion, although I was 40-something when that happened and we already had a small farm and a house we'd built ourselves. It's not that private jets have become a part of my life."

His car remains a 1999 BMW station wagon, with more than 100,000 miles on the odometer. His watch remains a Timex.

Frazier recognizes that his name will forever be linked with "Cold Mountain," but he is still confounded by what made it such a phenomenon.

Frazier did all he could to increase its readership, with two years of his life devoted to multiple book tour trips on an epic transcontinental odyssey that should be in the Guinness book.

"I kept a list of different cities that I visited, but I think I stopped at about 65," Frazier recalls. "I felt I was establishing an audience, so it seemed worth it."

Frazier laughs softly, then adds, "It probably was."

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