'Nightwoods' is overwritten
By Randy Boyagoda |
October 21, 2011, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
AMONG James Fenimore Cooper's many literary offenses, Mark Twain charged, was "surplusage." The word's undue thickness perfectly matches its meaning. It also feels of a piece with Cooper's own prose, and likewise Charles Frazier's: archaic-sounding and contrived.
Such artifice was both praised and panned in Frazier's previous novels, "Cold Mountain" and "Thirteen Moons," which featured archetypal structures and self-conscious literary effects. At their best, these books offer powerful sequences, in Homeric and Virgilian patterns, about thoughtful men and brave women trying to make sense of traumatic, large-scale events as they unfold in their private lives and relationships. At their worst, these books offer something more like baroque costume drama.
"Nightwoods," Frazier's new novel, is a departure from its predecessors in some respects. It's set in the early 1960s rather than the 19th century, and it involves no literary or historical elements of comparable grandeur and gravity. Indeed, based on its premise, the new book feels remarkably stripped down: A young woman named Luce, the caretaker of an old lodge in small-town North Carolina, becomes the guardian of the twin children of her murdered sister. In turn, she must defend them from Bud, their former stepfather, who killed their mother while they watched, and who believes the traumatized children know the location of some stolen money. As a setup, this promises suspense and mystery, to which Frazier adds family tension (when Luce's lawman-cum-drug-addict father buddies up with Bud) and romance (after the shy, handsome grandson of the lodge's deceased owner visits his inheritance and falls for Luce).
It's too bad the writing gets in the way of the storytelling - or, to be truer to Frazier, it's unfortunate the writing style gets all up and troublesomelike in the whisper-leaved way of the true and fine telling of this terrible and valiant tale. A little girl doesn't hurt her nose, she "pierced the wing of her nostril." Bottles don't spill or break, they are left "shattering with spewing concussion" and falling "in festive breakage." Furniture doesn't just age with time and use, but instead is "buffed to a pale silver nub by many decades of buttocks." Writing that invites this much attention, that so strives to concentrate our attention on its effects, has to achieve more than precious and overwrought evocation.
Likewise when Frazier draws on history, it's only for period details: We learn the names of the car magazines and cigarette brands and pinball machines and endless other such items you could find in small-town North Carolina in the early 1960s, but nothing of lunch-counter protests or Freedom Riders or the Civil Rights movement, which must have been making at least faint noises even in the most remote reaches of the state. To conjure a specific time and place in its material charms but effectively ignore its most significant human complexities is thin verisimilitude, if not cheap ornamentalism.
But as the novel is drawing to a close, Frazier finally tells a straight-up good story. The children run off to the woods, where they must survive by their wits, with Luce and Bud racing to find them, only to square off against each other. The final pages of "Nightwoods" make for some enjoyable reading, provided your imagination and spirits haven't already been flattened by all those decades of buttocks Frazier has surplusaged at us.
Such artifice was both praised and panned in Frazier's previous novels, "Cold Mountain" and "Thirteen Moons," which featured archetypal structures and self-conscious literary effects. At their best, these books offer powerful sequences, in Homeric and Virgilian patterns, about thoughtful men and brave women trying to make sense of traumatic, large-scale events as they unfold in their private lives and relationships. At their worst, these books offer something more like baroque costume drama.
"Nightwoods," Frazier's new novel, is a departure from its predecessors in some respects. It's set in the early 1960s rather than the 19th century, and it involves no literary or historical elements of comparable grandeur and gravity. Indeed, based on its premise, the new book feels remarkably stripped down: A young woman named Luce, the caretaker of an old lodge in small-town North Carolina, becomes the guardian of the twin children of her murdered sister. In turn, she must defend them from Bud, their former stepfather, who killed their mother while they watched, and who believes the traumatized children know the location of some stolen money. As a setup, this promises suspense and mystery, to which Frazier adds family tension (when Luce's lawman-cum-drug-addict father buddies up with Bud) and romance (after the shy, handsome grandson of the lodge's deceased owner visits his inheritance and falls for Luce).
It's too bad the writing gets in the way of the storytelling - or, to be truer to Frazier, it's unfortunate the writing style gets all up and troublesomelike in the whisper-leaved way of the true and fine telling of this terrible and valiant tale. A little girl doesn't hurt her nose, she "pierced the wing of her nostril." Bottles don't spill or break, they are left "shattering with spewing concussion" and falling "in festive breakage." Furniture doesn't just age with time and use, but instead is "buffed to a pale silver nub by many decades of buttocks." Writing that invites this much attention, that so strives to concentrate our attention on its effects, has to achieve more than precious and overwrought evocation.
Likewise when Frazier draws on history, it's only for period details: We learn the names of the car magazines and cigarette brands and pinball machines and endless other such items you could find in small-town North Carolina in the early 1960s, but nothing of lunch-counter protests or Freedom Riders or the Civil Rights movement, which must have been making at least faint noises even in the most remote reaches of the state. To conjure a specific time and place in its material charms but effectively ignore its most significant human complexities is thin verisimilitude, if not cheap ornamentalism.
But as the novel is drawing to a close, Frazier finally tells a straight-up good story. The children run off to the woods, where they must survive by their wits, with Luce and Bud racing to find them, only to square off against each other. The final pages of "Nightwoods" make for some enjoyable reading, provided your imagination and spirits haven't already been flattened by all those decades of buttocks Frazier has surplusaged at us.
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