Charles Frazier’s Disappointing Novel
Also: Medieval machines, Tudor games, John Dos Passos and the sea, and more.
I enjoyed Charles Frazier’s breakout novel, Cold Mountain, and liked Thirteen Moons even more, but I was not particularly impressed with either Nightwoods or Varina—though Nightwoods was the better of the two—and was hoping for a return to form with his latest novel, The Trackers. Alas, it was not to be. It is his worst novel yet. Here’s a snippet from my review in The Washington Free Beacon:
The novel is set during the Great Depression and follows Valentine Welch, an artist sent to rural Wyoming to paint a Post Office mural. He stays at the home of a wealthy art-loving rancher and former World War I sniper named John Long, who hopes to run for the United States Senate. When Long’s wife, Eve, disappears, he sends Welch to find her. This sends Welch across the country—to Seattle, Florida, and San Francisco—where he meets a motley cast of characters.
I don’t think it is giving too much away to share that Eve disappears to get an abortion. In one conversation, she tells Welch and Long’s right-hand man—a character called Faro—that she “knew too many women who gave up dreams, or gave up their actual lives—meaning they died—because they got pregnant at a bad time.” Faro responds: “Way I see it, Eve, nobody but you ought to be making the calls here.” Her body, her choice, and all that.
When Welch goes hunting with Long, he finds himself wishing his grandfather could have died like the prairie dogs, which is to say, “in an instant, vaporized, instead of three bad years of doctors and hospitals and confusion and pain.” Euthanasia pitch? Check.
And when Welch meets the family of Eve’s first husband in Florida, they turn out to be racist, of course, like everyone else in Florida in the novel, except Welch’s longsuffering cabby from Cuba.
But the main problem in the novel is the lack of anything approaching a distinctive voice, which is something both Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons have in spades:
Frazier has a gift for creating a landscape that is more than the sum of its parts. The forests and hills in Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons are not just background. They are living things. Not so in The Trackers. Other than a few nicely drawn scenes, the landscape is mostly flat . . . Stylistically, the main problem is Frazier’s use of big, implausible blocks of dialogue, where characters give interminable philosophical responses to simple questions and, eventually, tend to all sound alike. In one scene, Eve describes pictures for a page and a half. In another, Welch tells his cabby about the “wealth centers of the nation” and the injustice of the American experiment for a page. In another, a deputy takes 10 lines to explain why he likes billy clubs. None of the characters sound like they are living in the 1930s, except perhaps Faro, but even at his most distinctive, he sounds second-hand, stitched together from other Western characters in American literature, at once too old and too contemporary.
Is it too broad to say that most novelists—even prize-winning ones like Frazier—do one or two things very well and either repeat themselves (nothing wrong with that) or try something new, which often leads to disappointing results? Exceptions, of course, immediately come to mind, but they remain exceptions—I think.
Also in the Free Beacon, Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews Roxanna Asgarian’s account of the lives of the six adopted children who were killed—they were driven off a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway—by the lesbian couple who adopted them: “Asgarian is right that much of the reporting since then has focused on the "true crime" aspect of things—what would possess this white lesbian couple to adopt six black children, neglect them, abuse them, and then commit this horrific murder-suicide? A popular podcast called Broken Harts delved into the women's backgrounds and their social media posts to try to understand. Asgarian, on the other hand, went to try to find the birth parents for the children to understand why Child Protective Services removed them from their families in the first place and how they came to be placed for adoption. In some ways, the story is not atypical.”
Medieval machines: “The Middle Ages still suffers from the embarrassment of comparison. Before it glowed the light of the ancient Greeks – the great, early speculators of the natural world and our place in it. After the Middle Ages came the scientific revolution – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton – and the surging onrush of modernity. Even if the idea of the so-called ‘dark ages’ is waning, there remains the widespread impression that the Middle Ages is in some sense a time of stagnancy, especially in its understanding of science and the natural world. Is this an accurate view of medieval science? There is one discipline, often overlooked, that serves to illuminate the Middle Ages, as well as its place in the history of scientific thought: mechanics.”
The games of Tudor England: “Children’s games in Tudor England can be divided into those involving skill (manual dexterity or mental power) and those requiring physical strength. In the first category there could be actions using parts of the body alone: whistling, bird calls, popping noises, or tricks with the fingers. One of the latter, ‘handy-dandy,’ in which small items are moved from hand to hand while the onlooker tries to guess where they are, is mentioned in the fourteenth century and gained an entry in Florio’s Italian dictionary of 1598 . . . More interactive was ‘cherry-pit’ or ‘cherry-stone’: the competitive game most closely associated with children and the least likely to be played by anyone much older. It involved throwing or flicking cherry stones at a hole or target which enabled scoring and competitive play, perhaps with the forfeiture of the stones that missed. ‘Buckle-pit,’ mentioned by Thomas More in 1532, may have been a variant word, implying a contest to hit a pit.”
The cult of Sigmund Freud: Henry Marsh reviews Seamus O’Mahony’s The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic: A Story of Science, Sex and Psychoanalysis. Here’s a snippet: “O’Mahony gives an excellent account of the rise of psychoanalysis, and its cult-like nature. It had much more in common with the received, indisputable “truths” of religion than any science, and clearly filled a gap left by the decline of religious faith. As a counterpoint to Freud and his disciples, Trotter – the true hero of the book – is depicted by O’Mahony as a brilliant and modest surgeon in a prelapsarian age. When O’Mahony contacted UCH to ask if their archives had any material about him, the answer came back that there was none. It is Trotter, O’Mahony writes, who has much more to tell us about science and medicine, and even philosophy, than Freud, but is now completely forgotten. Freud, ‘flawed and fundamentally in error, a tragic figure whose life’s work was a chimera… is the great man’.”
John Dos Passos’s grandson writes about the novelist’s love of the sea: “John Dos Passos was the author of the U.S.A. trilogy, Manhattan Transfer, and Three Soldiers, among many other books, for which, in 1957, he was awarded the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was also my grandfather. I never met him—he died 13 years before I was born—but I have been able to get a sense of his formidable spirit from old family photographs. In one of my favorites, taken when he was in his 60s, he is in a boat on the Potomac River near Dos Passos Farm in Westmoreland County, Virginia. The river is wide there, near where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, and my grandfather is holding up a pufferfish, inflated in full glory before the camera.”
In praise of the clavichord: “With roots reaching deep into the recesses of musical memory, past the exotic origins of the lute and the rustic buzz of the shawm and crumhorn, perhaps even beyond the ancient taverns whence came the fiddle, the clavichord nonetheless had its heyday rather late compared to most instruments.”
A photographer refuses a Sony World Photography Award because his photograph was created by AI: “Boris Eldagsen submitted an AI-generated image to the Sony World Photography Awards just to be ‘a cheeky monkey,’ but he didn’t think he’d actually win.”
The oldest children’s bookstore in the country is not that old: “Once Upon a Time Bookstore in Montrose was celebrating a milestone last Saturday: The 57-year-old store, which is said to be the oldest children’s bookstore in the country, was celebrating the 20-year anniversary of its ownership by the Palacios family.”
Harry Potter is coming to television: “At its Max streaming event, Warner Bros. Discovery confirmed a new era is coming for Harry Potter fans. The company announced a TV series based on all seven books about the boy wizard . . . ‘This new Max Original series will dive deep into each of the iconic books that fans have continued to enjoy for all of these years,’ said Casey Bloys . . . he also assured fans would be ‘a faithful adaptation.’”
Doubtless, Frazier's novel will be considered for a Pulitzer, National Book Award, and all the other places where received wisdom can be rewarded and reinforced.