TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 6/18/97: Feeding Frenzy By Stuart Stevens Fiction 6/17/97: Straight Man By Richard Russo Fiction 6/16/97: The Perfect Storm By Sebastian Junger Nonfiction 6/13/97: The Good Brother By Chris Offutt Fiction 6/12/97: Making Waves By Mario Vargas Llosa Nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: No more magic realism By Alberto Fuguet A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

COLD MOUNTAIN______ BY CHARLES FRAZIER ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 367 PAGES FICTION BY JONATHAN MILES my immediate impression, upon reading the first 30 or so pages of this debut novel, was that Charles Frazier has a stunning talent for aping Cormac McCarthy. A great many of McCarthy's stylistic earmarks -- especially the leaner, less baroque McCarthy of recent years -- are present here: keen-eyed and exacting descriptions of landscape and flora; grim and spare dialogue devoid of quotation marks; flurries of neologisms; and a deliberately paced, vigorous yet elegant narrative voice that yearns to be read by oil lamp. Venture 30 pages further in, however, and your impression changes: Charles Frazier may be picking the coins out of Cormac McCarthy's pockets, but my God what a novel he has made from them. Set in North Carolina in the waning days of the Civil War, "Cold Mountain" tells the story of Inman, a wounded Confederate infantryman, and Ada, the woman for whom he abandons the front and embarks on an anguished odyssey home. Inman's footpath through the bruised landscape of the South is interwoven with Ada's struggle to eke out an existence on her late father's farm at Cold Mountain. Into both their lives enter fellow victims of war and heartbreak: Ruby, a butchy young drifter who directs Ada in the way of moon signs and root doctoring and tending to a farm; Stobrod, Ruby's no 'count father who, amidst the ugly debris of war, discovers the beauty of music and is thus redeemed; and a vividly depicted panoply of deserters, guardsmen, lechers, blind men, banjoists, war widows, goat herders and corpses. At the novel's start, when Inman begins his journey, Ada is neither his wife nor his lover; their prewar meetings are recounted as awkward affairs, as tentative and demure as the courtings in Victorian novels. Amid the operatic passion of war, then, their innocence takes on a sort of crazed charm, and despite the severe experiences that precede their reunion, their love remains beyond the reach of the war. Even at the height of their affair, when Ada is first undressing before Inman, this innocence stands: Trying to remove a pair of hunter's pants, Ada cowhops from leg to leg, her ankle caught in the pantleg. It would take the bulk of a thousand paperback romances to produce a scene so endearing. Frazier may be indebted to McCarthy, but "Cold Mountain" evokes other writers as well -- among them Stendahl, Tolstoy and Stephen Crane. If living in a tragic land is equal to living in a tragic time, as Wallace Stevens proposed, then Frazier's novel, like the best Civil War literature, explores what it means to exist in both. Despite its stylistic echoes, "Cold Mountain" is an intensely moving novel, a spare but eloquent exegesis on love and war. The story of Inman and Ada will remain with you long after the oil lamp is extinguished. June 19, 1997 Jonathan Miles lives in Oxford, Miss. His writing has appeared in the Oxford American and the New York Times Magazine. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html