'Nightwoods': Thrills and beauty amid the Smokies

By Charles Frazier

Random House. 259 pp. $26

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Katie Haegele

What sort of person will most love Charles Frazier's gritty new beauty of a novel? A bearded urban wannabe-cowboy? Maybe a bona fide mountain girl, with a much-used library card? Bluegrass-loving poets, for sure.

All silliness aside, it's hard to imagine a reader who won't warm to Nightwoods, the new novel by the author of Cold Mountain, which won the National Book Award in 1997.

Set deep in a Smoky Mountains wilderness of hard winters and old ladies who defend their homes with shotguns, Nightwoods is a tough-guy book, in a way. But its hero is a woman named Luce, and no woman could write a female character who rings any truer.

When we first meet her, Luce is a bit inexplicable. She seems to be rather young, yet she lives alone in the woods as the "caretaker" of a moldering holiday lodge that hasn't had any visitors - or needed much care - for many years. She's a loner, plainspoken but witty and well-read, like the tough-bird narrator of a Bobbie Ann Mason story. She's happy to live a rowboat's journey across the lake from her nearest human neighbor.

Meanwhile, in the world beyond, the 20th century is rolling along. It's hard to pinpoint what year it is, but with James Brown on the radio and World War II a recent memory, it seems to be the late '50s. Beyond her deep enjoyment of whatever soul music her radio can get from Nashville on a clear night, Luce doesn't care much for "the world of people," and eventually we learn that she has her reasons.

Frazier eases us slowly into a relationship with Luce by describing, with abundant love and understanding, the natural world that surrounds her and the way she interacts with it. Appealing, ageless images abound: Bare branches against the night sky, piles of blankets on the bed, collards and grits for breakfast. For awhile Luce does nothing but survive, buoyed by what she calls nature's "compensations" for loneliness: Observing the seasons as they change, spotting a wildcat as it prowls around a stand of pines at dawn. But then her sister Lily's kids show up, and the solitude of her life opens up.

Lily was murdered by her horrible husband, Bud, and the twins, a boy and girl of around 6, watched it happen. By the time they end up at Luce's lodge, they're mute and nearly catatonic, except for their occasional bursts of destructive violence. The state has deemed them "feebleminded," but Luce tries to love them by teaching them, and together they identify the bloodroot and galax growing wild and harvest the vegetables she planted herself. What Luce doesn't know, but we readers do, is that Bud - a nasty, scrawny, pill-popping drifter type - has been found not guilty of the murder and walked away from the courthouse a free man. Also, that he has a compelling reason to want to track down the kids.

It's not quite lurid or weird enough to be a Southern gothic, but Nightwoods contains enough danger to make for more exciting reading than the typical literary novel. (And there's a love interest, too.) Yet with its dry sense of humor and sharp insight, the book offers more than thrills and chills. As Stephen King has always done, Frazier peppers his narrative with surprising images, like the "vampire-killing" rectangle of light from the door that cuts through the dark of a dusty old drinking establishment.

The writer also has made a smart choice setting this novel in some hazily unspecific middle part of the last century. The references are modern - burger joints and black-and-white cop cars - but the 1950s were just long ago enough to serve as a link to a much more distant past.

Through the elderly character of Maddie, for instance, a woman who has lived her whole long life on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, we're shown the value and beauty of the old ways of doing things. That the scene in which Maddie and her old pony mare work together to crush sugar cane into molasses is the first time the children show any sign of life is no coincidence. More than anything, it seems Frazier wants us to know that in these mountains, the past still echoes - not only the hardscrabble past of the American settlers but also the older wisdom of the people native to the land, even though every single person in the novel (except for James Brown on the radio) is white.

And older than any human memory, of course, is the natural world, which is the true subject of this novel and which Frazier writes about with such intimacy and authority that we know his knowledge comes from lived experience rather than from books.

After the excitement of the story dies down, the memory of Frazier's imagery will remain, as in this moment, when Luce sits down with a glass of red wine that's "Old and awfully good and autumnal in the November sundown with brown frostbit apples still hanging from bare limbs in the orchard and a fingernail radius of yellow moon following the sun to the horizon."