Charles Frazier came down off the mountain to sign books at Malaprop's Saturday night. The place was packed. People waited in line for an hour or more to have a book signed by the author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons. Someone told us that he'd come in earlier in the week to start signing books because the demand was so high.

Charles Frazier, who lives here in Ashvegas, has a new book out in stores on Tuesday. "Thirteen Moons" is his second after beloved "Cold Mountain." We'll buy it to support the local writer. But he's having a tough time with the critics, which appear mixed. Most of the big shots are either luke warm, or don't like it at all. Others absolutely love it.
You decide.

The Amazon link here.

Publisher's Weekly, at Powell's Books, loves it.

"When Frazier's debut Cold Mountain blossomed into a National Book Award–winning bestseller with four million copies in print, expectations for the follow-up rose almost immediately. A decade later, the good news is that Frazier's storytelling prowess doesn't falter in this sophomore effort, a bountiful literary panorama again set primarily in North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains. ...With pristine prose that's often wry, Frazier brings a rough-and-tumble pioneer past magnificently to life, indicts America with painful bluntness for the betrayal of its native people and recounts a romance rife with sadness. ... The history that Frazier hauntingly unwinds through Will is as melodic as it is melancholy, but the sublime love story is the narrative's true heart." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Thirteen Moons brings this vanished world thrillingly alive, retelling the agonizing stories of “the Removal” (of Indians from their ancestral lands) and the lie of “Reconstruction”; creating literally dozens of heart-stopping word pictures (e.g., autumns display “a few stunted pumpkins still glowing in the fields and a few persistent apples hanging red in the skeletal orchards”); building unforgettable characterizations of the sorrow-laden everyman Will (whom we first, then finally glimpse as a reclusive anachronism, weathered by “a near century of living”), unpredictable Featherstone and stoical Bear (a character Faulkner might have created), Claire who belongs to no man, ancient medicine woman Granny Squirrel, and all the uprooted and dispossessed souls enduring “the days and nights, the thirteen moons” of each accumulating year, while making their final journey “to the Nightland.” One of the great Native American, and American stories, and a great gift to all of us, from one of our very best writers

New York Times review Kakutani doesn't like it. "The passage of time — in the life of the nation and in Will’s own life — seems to be Mr. Frazier’s real subject in this moving but fundamentally flawed novel."

The New Yorker doesn't like it.

There are successful scenes along the way, and, as in “Cold Mountain,” the world of the Appalachian forest primeval is brought to life. But neither of the plot lines is effective, and the problem is Cooper. He’s too important an actor in the historical drama, so he can reflect on it but he cannot reflect it; and he’s too eccentric a figure in the private drama.

Booklist says "Thirteen Moons" is OK.

... And he remains faithful to a method that marked "Cold Mountain" in readers' memories: a proliferation of detail about customs and costumes, about food and recreation--pretty much what everything looked and smelled like. Unfortunately, for the first fourth of the book, there is too much detail for the plot to easily bear. But, finally, the characters are able to step out from behind this blanket of particulars and incidentals and make the story work. Expect considerable demand, of course. Brad Hooper Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley review rips Frazier.

Read a bit of "Thirteen Moons" on the Washington Post's web site here.

Reading Frazier is like sitting by the cracker barrel for hour after hour and listening to an amiable but impossibly gassy guy who talks real slow, says "I reckon" a whole lot and never shuts up. His novels have little structure and not much in the way of plot...

... In other words, in Thirteen Moons Frazier essentially has fictionalized history. Nothing wrong with that: happens all the time. But the novel provides less imagination and invention than readers are likely to expect; it reads more like a dutifully researched (check out that author's note) graduate school paper than a work of fiction.

... Will readers flock to Thirteen Moons as they did to Cold Mountain ? Who knows? Frazier's new publisher has a ton of money invested in him and will be pulling out all the stops. One thing is certain: Thirteen Moons is going to be putting a whole bunch of people to sleep.

Jim Buchanan's column about "Thirteen Moons" in the Asheville Citizen-Times. He loves it.

Charles Frazier, who lives here in Ashvegas, has a new book coming out next week. Maybe you've heard of it. It's called Thirteen Moons. He got paid $8 million, but most folks don't seem to like it much. We're trying to keep tabs on some of the big reviewers and their opinions. So here's critic Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times.
Kakutani doesn't love the book. Nor does she rip Frazier a new one. Her review falls somewhere in between. Take this, for example, as the review contrasts the book to Frazier's "Cold Mountain":

In other respects, however, the two novels could not be more different. Whereas the narrative in “Cold Mountain” was rich and dense as a fruitcake, “Thirteen Moons” — despite its often somber subject matter — is a considerably airier production: reminiscent, at times, of Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man” and a lot closer to Larry McMurtry than to Cormac McCarthy.

Whereas the love story in “Cold Mountain” felt like a real romance between two real people, fleshed out in intimate psychological detail, the one in “Thirteen Moons” feels more like an authorial construct between his hero and a beauteous wraith who mysteriously appears and disappears as the plot demands.

Although the reader believes in the youthful passion that the novel’s narrator, Will Cooper, feels for Claire and roots for them to end up together, Mr. Frazier does little to make their relationship remotely palpable or plausible. Claire goes hot and cold on Will for no discernible reason, often vanishing from his life for years, even decades at a time, and she remains a bizarrely opaque character throughout the novel: more some sort of chivalric symbol than a flesh and blood woman like Ada in “Cold Mountain.”

Kakutani continues on, describing the tale and showing some love for Frazier's sense of place and "pointillist prose to give the reader an aching appreciation" of the plight of the Cherokee Indians. But she still feels that Frazier falls shot in delivering the book's love story.

Mr. Frazier recounts Will’s melancholy adventures with plenty of narrative brio, giving the reader a succession of suspenseful — and in some cases touching — set pieces: the young Will venturing out into the wilderness for the first time, armed only with a sketchy map and a few provisions; Will facing off in a duel with Claire’s sadistic guardian, Featherstone; Will and Bear deciding to hunt down a group of their own people (who have killed some government soldiers) to win permission to stay on their land. As for Will’s infrequent meetings with Claire, they are compelling enough but ultimately disappointing, given Claire’s strangely inscrutable and erratic behavior. For that matter “Thirteen Moons” is at its most eloquent not in chronicling Will’s love life or even his peregrinations around America, but in using his story to give us a window on a country in transition, hurtling from an era of coonskin hats into one of “telephones and mile-a-minute automobiles and electric lights and moving pictures and trains.

But in the end, the book just doesn't work for Kakutani:

The passage of time — in the life of the nation and in Will’s own life — seems to be Mr. Frazier’s real subject in this moving but fundamentally flawed novel. “Alarming, really,” Will thinks, “how all the wheels of the world — the days and nights, the thirteen moons, the four seasons, and the great singular round of the year itself — begin spinning faster and faster the closer we get to the Nightland. We’re called to it and it pulls us. And the weaker we become, the harder and faster it pulls.”

So just a few days after we blogged about an Ashvegas columnist's review of Charles Frazier's new book "thirteen moons," we ran across Esquire magazine's take. Let's just say it's not pretty.
In it's one column "Big Book of the Month," Esquire notes that Frazier was paid $8.25 million for his one-page book idea, which works out to getting paid about $20,000 a page for the 400-page book.

The story, built around a white orphan who grows up to become chief of a Cherokee clan, has almost no dialogue and is narrated by a bitter old man. Esquire calls the book "plodding," with a faint love story as the only thing going for it.

"Plodding through Thirteen Moons, one admires its scope and versimilitude. But this tale is meant to be an elegy - both for a woman and an epoch of history. And in the end, you probably won't miss either. You'll mourn only that bygone era when reward and result bore a closer correlation."

Ouch.

Saw this in the Malaprop's store window. It's kinda hard to read. What you need to know - Frazier will be reading at Malaprop's on Oct. 14. He'll be reading from his new book, thirteen moons, which will be released in a couple of weeks.

This will be one of the biggest book releases of this fall, and the book buzz is starting to build. Here's a snippet from Jim Buchanan's column in the Asheville Citizen-Times today (Buchanan has an advance copy of the book):

I never developed a taste for vino, and never understood the language surrounding it. Words like complexity, depth, character, etc., never rang really true to me when discussing fermented grapes.

Just a few pages into “thirteen moons,’’ I got it.

There are things so masterful that words can’t do them justice. Frazier’s writing falls in that category. But more importantly, with “Cold Mountain’’ and now with “thirteen moons,’’ he’s doing important work in filling the gaps, helping restore the roots, of our knowledge of our own history.

He captures snapshots of people and places that still echo here today, sometimes faintly, sometimes growing louder with cultural revivals like the efforts taking place in Cherokee.