Charles Frazier’s Claptrap of a Novel

There is no avoiding the fact that Charles Frazier’s’s most recent book, The Trackers, is a failure.

Frazier’s’s function has been somewhat of a mixed bag ever since he won the National Book Award for his captivating album, Cold Mountain. Will Cooper, an infant who is sold off by his adopted parents to pass a investing post in the Cherokee Nation hillsides, is the subject of Frazier’s’s 2006 follow-up to Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons. After obtaining his independence and falling in love with the enigmatic Claire, he finds himself engaged in conflict with both Featherstone, Claire’s’s aggressive husband, and the federal government on behalf of the Cherokee. It’s’s a book about suffering and how, frequently, people” die in ignorance and delusion.” Nearly nothing in life, according to Frazier,” is epical or horrible at the time it is performed.” At least personally, history is almost entirely pitiful in the making.

Nightwoods (2011) was Frazier’s first novel set in the 20th century, and while it lacks the narrative drive of either Cold Mountain or Thirteen Moons (not that Frazier is known for his tight plots), the setting in Appalachia brings out the best in Frazier. The mountains’ dark forests—both beautiful and deadly—are as inscrutable as the human heart.

However, Frazier makes it clear that he wants to say something” important” in Varina( 2018 ), a book about the life of the wife of Jefferson Davis and the only president of Confederate States of America. As a result, the book alternates between lovely depictions of the American South and overt political commentary that passes for speech. Varina says later on,” If you haven’t noticed, we’re’re a angry land.” The perfect hand winning is the only encouraging development.

Unfortunately, The Trackers contains a good deal of this nonsense. The book follows Valentine Welch, an actor sent to remote Wyoming to ink a Post Office painting, and is set during the Great Depression. He resides at the house of John Long, a fortunate art enthusiast and ex World War I rifle who intends to run for the US Senate. Long sends Welch to look for his family Eve after she vanishes. Welch is then transported across the nation to Seattle, Florida, and San Francisco, where he encounters a diverse group of people.

I don’t believe sharing that Eve vanishes to have an abortion is giving away too little. She says in one exchange that she” knew too many ladies who gave up passions, or given up their official lives— meaning they died— because they got pregnant at a good time” to Welch and Long’s’s right-hand man, Faro. Faro responds,” In my opinion, Eve, only you should be making the calls below.” her preference, her appearance, and everything else.

Welch finds himself wishing his father could have passed away like the prairie dogs, or” in an instant, vaporized, instead of three good days of doctors and hospitals and bewilderment and sadness ,” when he goes hunting with Long. pitching for death Verify.

The life of Eve’s’s second husband is also bigoted when Welch meets them in Florida, just like everyone else in the book except for the long-suffering Cuban cab driver. The driver immediately begins to complain about government spending, Communists, and” blacks” when Welch agrees to ride along with him. The driver pulls a gun on Welch and tells him to get out of the vehicle when the latter nips at him for his duplicity. It turns out that the vehicle is hoping to receive an” large check” from the government really like Weilch. Welch exits and declares,” Florida is an arduous say.” It’s’s also a little exhausting to watch The Trackers.

There are additional issues. Frazier has a talent for producing landscapes that are greater than the sum of their individual components. Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons‘ trees and hills are more than just a backdrop. They are creatures of life. Not in The Trackers, though. The scenery is mostly flat, with the exception of a few gently drawn events.

While Welch’s’s travels across the country may provide him something to do as a personality, they don’t add up to much of the storyline. A several people tell lengthy stories that go on for pages for no apparent cause.

The main issue aesthetically is Frazier’s’s use of large, implausible dialogue blocks, where characters give endless philosophical answers to straightforward questions before eventually sounding the same. Eve describes images in one image for one page and a half. For a document in another, Welch tells his cab driver about the” cash centers of the society” and how unfair the American experiment was. In another, a deputy spends ten lines describing his fondness for frank venues. Except for Faro, none of the characters sound like they are from the 1930s. However, even at his most recognizable, he sounds second-hand, stitched together from many European characters in American literature, and is simultaneously quite old and quite modern.

Thirteen Moons gave us Bear and Featherstone and lines like “All you could do was try to go on living as a form of vengeance.” The Trackers gives us the wisdom of the day served up by unlikeable characters as they drive around Florida or ride across the Wyoming desert.

What ever became of Charles Frazier?

A Novel called The Trackers
authored by Charles Frazier
Ecco, 336 pages,$ 29.

Micah Mattix, a professor of English at Regent University, has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, and many other publications.