The Care and Feeding of Fiction

Darryl Livingston

22 July 2008

How too many property rights wreck the market.

A poet's search to capture her excruciating sickness. Everything, according to a dazzling book about America. The weird search to scribble history in the lack of proof.

But it's like a graveyard with no bodies in it. Most of us do not want stories to be, in the deepest sense, imaginary.

They need them to obey the conventions of current realism. Therefore John Berendt, writer of Midnight in the Garden of Good and noxious, has asserted of Cold Mountain that it is "utterly convincing down to the final detail." And he's right. But Cold Mountain is definitely convincing in an imaginary way. Frazier has written a stirring story of bloody simplicity and epic power. This could be an exceptionally tremorless 1st novel. He travels raggedly from Tennessee to the mountains of North Carolina where he had grown up. There, near Cold Mountain, waits his lover, a lady called Ada Monroe. Inman is silent, good, and strong--one must imagine a Confederate Clint Eastwood. He's a Homeric foot soldier--Frazier has stated that he had Odysseus in mind--and quite imaginary. The novel's unreality flows from Inman's unreality. Cold Mountain rolls the brougham of itself from episode to episode, till Inman reaches home. But the sad couple was authorized a night of keenness, and a moist epilogue shows an ecstatic small girl, the product of this union, frolicking with her ma some years on : the euphoric end of an euphoric ending. Frazier is a good writer : calm, for the most part unsentimental, regularly plush. "There wasn't moonlight nor the prick of lantern light from some welcoming home. Such poetry, if not really antiquarian's dust, is the carbon of something once fiery. It isn't a living nineteen th -century poetry, or a living fresh poetry, but rather a twenty th -century reduction, living off the alms of the nineteen th century. To compare Crane and Frazier is to compare a genuine, fibrous style with educational tissue. Frazier controls all his similes so they stay ruly. In short, Frazier sacrifices classy life to historical life. When Inman is seduced, for example, he places his hand on the lady's leg, high up. But Inman isn't writing anything down--he is being seduced, he's speaking to himself. This incapacity to convey the "old consciousness" wasn't a matter of inaccuracy but of bad religion. It'd always be the new consciousness imagining what the old consciousness was like--forcing it to be "old." "And even then" James added, "it's all humbug." Cold Mountain is complicated humbug.