-Rookie hoopla, rave reviews, a movie deal with the star treatment. In a sense, I get it. This was Frazier’s first novel, he splashed hickory smoke and blood across 400-some pages, so real you could smell it, and grabbed the National Book Award. Wrote a #1 bestseller—and I see it. Sort of.

Frazier’s characterizations are lean but thorough, his language is in-your-face crude and still tugs at heart-strings; this is an intense, gripping book, and worth a read. Unfortunately, the philosophy is incoherent—a trait in literature that never fails to annoy.

If Cold Mountain is taken as a Civil War-era documentary, an unsparing microcosm of our national tragedy, well and good. But Frazier can’t resist crossing into philosophical speculation. The protagonist, Inman, must be considered a stoic in the modern sense, violently self-sufficient, meeting horror with resigned despair: “All the resurrection any man might expect was…to be dragged dead from the grave at rope’s end” (p. 397). Inman is a dead-earnest cynic with a gun, and the world Frazier paints is harsh and starkly material. (Ex: His dialogue, lacking quotation marks, gives conversations an understated feel, as if the words arise more from narrative circumstances than from the characters’ minds.) Frazier’s story becomes nonsensical when it marries vivid natural beauty and “cures of all sorts” (p. 418) to this mechanistic life—as if a brutal, Darwinist world occasionally dresses in pastels, and ought to be adored. Are we to fight and claw or are we to sigh and make daisy chains? Despite its romantic inconsistencies, this story is ultimately deterministic, and the ending bears this out. In some ways, Cold Mountain is like reading The Call of the Wild starring not dogs but humans.