I finally read one of the books on the Snarkling list. And coincidentally, this is a great book for considering the so-called demarcation between literary fiction and pop fiction. Cold Mountain is most definitely literary fiction in terms of its atmospheric writing style (the dialogue isn’t even set off by quotation marks, but by single m-dashes, as if Frazier decided not to interrupt the book’s poetry with something as mundane as human speech) but the book is also very much plot-driven; it follows two people: a Civil War deserter as he makes his way back to his home and sweetheart, and the sweetheart as she struggles to acquire the skills she needs to run a farm after her protective and indulgent father dies and she finds herself rendered cash-poor by the South’s impending collapse.

I liked the book a lot, although I was somewhat disappointed by the ending, which I arrived at around 2 a.m. today. And so here is the rub. The book has big bones: not only the emotional toll of the war but even more interesting to my mind its effects on civilian life, the moral and actual anarchy that sets in as its consequence. As a deserter, Inman has to negotiate what would normally have been the fringes of rural Blue Ridge society but has grown, as the war has waned down, to occupy a much larger influence : “outliers,” fellow deserters, the thuggish Home Guard charged with capturing deserters, Federalist raiders, Federalist sympathizers. So naturally as I rode along with the characters and the plot I was looking to Inman as a metaphor for, perhaps, contemporary America (the book was published in 1997 so is pre-Iraq but by Frazier’s photo on the back he looks to be a boomer, so it could have been a statement about Viet Nam) or even more likely the post-War American South. I was looking, therefore, for something in the book’s resolution that would point to such themes.

Instead, I felt that the book was looking through the wrong end of a telescope, ending as it did as a “mere” romantic tragedy.

I put mere in quotes because far be it from me to belittle the lives of fictional romantic figures, lol.

But truly, I wanted more. You have two sensitive people rebuilding their emotional selves in the aftermath of experiences that were both physically and emotionally brutal. Brutalizing, literally, in Inman’s case. That’s plenty to hang a book on, yeah. But against that particular backdrop, for some reason, I wanted more. Instead, I got the exact invert of a romance novel’s HEA, every bit as improbable in its own way as a bedazzling kiss in the last paragraph of a mass market paperback.

There’s a caveat to this criticism, of course: my disappointment reflects perhaps my own expectations more than any objective failure on the part of Frazier (although perhaps not; there are many stories nestled within this story, and aren’t they all about how the war tore peoples’ lives apart and left them alone to patch the scaps together?) Nonetheless, what captivated me more than Cold Mountain‘s love story was the question of how individuals who survived the Civil War rebuilt their lives afterward. They did, somehow; we did patch this country together again, somehow.

About midway through the book, Inman is betrayed to the Home Guard and finds himself bound chain-gang like to fifteen other men being yanked toward either prison or death, and suddenly Frasier breaks in with this:

Like the vast bulk of people, the captives would pass from the earth without hardly making any mark more lasting than plowing a furrow. You could bury them and knife their names onto an oak plank and stand it up in the dirt, and not one thing–not their acts of meanness or kindness or cowardice or courage, not their fears or hopes, not the features of their faces–would be remembered even as long as it would take the gouged characters in the plank to weather away. They walked therefore bent, as if bearing the burden of lives lived beyond recollection.

So maybe that’s the fulcrum, then, and maybe that’s why the book’s ending narrows down the way it does; maybe it’s intended as an existential back of the hand about the meaningless of individuals’ lives. But then why do some characters not only survive but come to be pictured, some decade later, as flourishing? To highlight also that fate is arbitrary? And why go easier, ultimately, on the women than the men? (I’m trying to do this without inserting blatant spoilers, btw, sorry if that makes this part of my post go a bit vague.)

What succeeds in the book is that it’s written with a literary hand, yet for the most part I don’t feel Frazier himself inserted into the prose; the story-telling is that strong; when he does, as in the paragraph I quoted above, it’s not unwelcome, it works as a clue to help frame the narrative; it’s not intrusive. But somehow with the ending it seems his hand suddenly becomes both evident and heavy, as if as the deity of this book’s world he had his own private reasons for snipping particular threads.

So I’m left thinking “why did you do that?” where before the ending I was thrilling to the idea that I’d be left with a different question altogether.