Into the Woods

Two confessions. One: it has taken me forever to write about Nightwoods by Charles Frazier. I finished it probably the same day I posted about Wilder Life and here we are, at least a week later, with me just starting to try to write about it. I don’t know why the avoidance. Perhaps actually writing about it will help unravel the mystery (okay, to be fair, I was in tech for a show all last week, so that might have been part of it, but I prefer to think it was something in the book itself!).

Second confession: I was very late to the Cold Mountain party. I heard nothing about the book when it first came out (because I live under a rock apparently) and later all I knew of it was a movie with Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, neither of whom are enough to propel me to a movie theater ever. However, eventually I picked it up and LOVED IT. Instant convert. What an amazing book - history, beautiful writing, wonderful characters...and all based on actual family lore. It made me want to write my great great grandmother's story in the same sort of sweeping, historical fiction kind of way - well, I still want to do that, but let's try to be realistic, shall we? I even finally watched the movie and it was far better than it had any right to be. I still don't much care for Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, but the movie was good.

So I was excited when Charles Frazier came out with a new book this year, Nightwoods, and the reviews were very good (he had another book in there somewhere, but I haven't read it - if you have, let me know if I should!). And it was good. It just wasn't Cold Mountain. So I think that has left me not sure what to say about it.

On its face, the story is kind of obvious and almost caricaturish what with the redneck relatives and the backwoods setting and potentially heartwarming ending all due to the love of children. Amazon certainly does the book no favors with this description: "Before the children, Luce was content with the reimbursements of the rich Appalachian landscape, choosing to live apart from the small community around her. But the coming of the children changes everything, cracking open her solitary life in difficult, hopeful, dangerous ways." Trust me, if I hadn't loved Cold Mountain, I wouldn't have gone near this book based on THAT!

But Charles Frazier is an incredibly talented writer, so he does lift the novel above that. Here are just a few examples:

The place spoke of time. How you’re here and then you’re gone, and all you leave for a little while afterward are a few artifacts that outlive you. Loc. 77

 Easy to be disdainful and ironic toward others’ false values. Loc. 85

 She might have been tall and willowy when she was young, before time compressed her into herself, thickening and shortening and bending year by year until all you could see of the young woman she had been were her quick blue eyes, faded almost to the color of steel. Loc. 209

 Now Luce lay awake in the dark, knowing Maddie’s murder ballads addressed exactly that situation, and taught that the flame of urgent coupling burned hottest against the women, no matter how romantic and high and heartsick the anguish of the man might be pitched in retrospect. Loc.227

He also gets huge points for echoing one of my favorite beliefs in life: "Probably, if you breaded cardboard in cornmeal and and fried it in lard, it would taste pretty good too." Loc. 580 (I generally apply this axiom to a paper napkin, but the sentiment is the same)

I think I came away from the book a little confused, though, because a lot of the deepest thoughts (for lack of a better phrase) seemed to come from the villain(s) of the book. What is the nature of truth? Why are we here? Can people really change?

The meaning of the necklace could be summed into one useful idea – adapted from the possibly true fact that sharks die if they stop swimming forward – useful for every single misstep in life. Move on. And the meaning of the tattoo was equally brief, and no argument about it. Everybody dies. Loc. 289

People don’t change, Lola said. Maybe you’re still young enough to pretend that’s not true. People are who they are, and everybody around them has to take it or go somewhere else.  Loc. 2871

 Truth isn’t in your own self, and it sure isn’t in theirs. Whatever you tell me or I tell you, and call it truth, is nothing but convenient feelings and asswipe opinions. Real truth is way beyond people. Our brains weren’t tuned to get but a glimpse of it off in the distance 

     -- No. That’s not the way it is.

     -- Yeah, that is the way it is. People love the word, but all the use it for is like a club to beat you with. If we ever had the truth in our heads, we couldn’t live with it. But because we’re friends, I’m happy to hear about your feelings and opinions, and maybe tell a few of my own, as long as we agree to call things by their right names. Loc. 2984

Lots of big questions put out there, but only the bad guys seem to have any answers or opinions. The heroine, Luce, just kind of floats along until she is forced back into real life and into confronting her past by the arrival of the children and a guy - and again, good thing the writing is fantastic because, ugh. I mean, just read that last sentence again. Ugh! Aren't there other ways that women can confront their past and get excited about the future again? Are the two options to have a pseudo family thrust upon you or to become a hermit forever?

I realize this makes it sound like I didn't like the book and I did. I really did. I loved the writing, I enjoyed the characters. But I think writing this post is helping me figure out the avoidance (I knew it!) - I am just not sure what the basic message is here. And that bugs me. Something wasn't fleshed out enough or examined deeply enough or given enough depth of thought. Is he just not good at writing women? I don't remember thinking that about Cold Mountain, but then, I wasn't trying to write about it either. Maybe he is just a really, really good romance writer. After all, even in her hermitage, Luce ends up with a wine cellar full of excellent vintage wine so she can have those nice evenings with the guy. Does it bug me? I guess so. But on some level, it doesn't matter when there is writing like this:

Luce poured two glasses of red wine from a basement bottle with a mildewed French label. Old and awfully good and autumnal in the November sundown with brown frost-bit apples still hanging from bare limbs in the orchard and a fingernail radius of yellow moon following the sun to the horizon. Leaves covered the grass. Something yet trilled in the woods, a final katydid or frog. A bit in the air, and not a cloud in the sky. Bands of soft color glowed above the westward peaks. Peach and apricot and sepia, fading in pretty degrees to blue and finally indigo straight up. Expressed as art, the colors would lay on the canvas entirely unnatural and sentimental, and yet they were a genuine manifestation of place many evenings in the fall. Loc. 3097