Frazier comes down from 'Cold Mountain,' into 'Nightwoods' - USA Today

ASHEVILLE, N.C. – When Charles Frazier describes a character in his new novel, Nightwoods, to be released today, as "a backroads, scenic-route guy," he could be writing about himself.

For scenery, consider the spectacular views of the Blue Ridge Mountains from Frazier's front lawn, perched on a narrow ridge, a 10-minute drive up a twisty road from downtown Asheville.

To the north, through the morning mist, he points out Tennessee, more than 30 miles away. And to the west, 6,030-foot-high Cold Mountain, made famous by Frazier's 1997 Civil War best seller. Cold Mountain was a debut novel that came out of nowhere, as they say in publishing, and grew into a phenomenon.

For back roads, Frazier, 60, hits the nearby mountain bike trails. He maintains a daily tally of the miles he rides and the words he writes.

"I try to do 1,000 miles over the summer," he says.

And the words?

"Well, I'm a slow writer," he replies with a shy smile. "For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not."

And a bad day?

"I just stare and ask myself, 'What's the point?' When the language doesn't come, when you cannot hear the narrative voice in your head."

He takes the scenic route to writing: "I know I could just get something down and fix it later. But if I'm not engaged in the language, I have no confidence in the story. It's a lot more than plot. The language has to keep my interest."

Nightwoods (Random House, $26) is part thriller, part love story, triggered by a murder. It's set in Frazier terrain, the southern Appalachian Mountains, but in the early 1960s.

"I was looking for a different challenge," he says in the living room of his house. Built out of stone and wood in the late '40s, the house is far more modest than the view. After two historical novels — his second, Thirteen Moons (2006), was inspired by a 19th-century white man adopted by the Cherokees — "I wanted to write a book that was shorter and moved more quickly."

Cold Mountain was a rare literary best seller: a debut by an unknown former English professor. It was popular even before it won the National Book Award or was turned into a hit movie in 2003 starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman.

And if that's not enough of an appealing story, consider Frazier's acceptance speech at the book awards in 1997, when he credited his wife, Katherine: "There are not many wives who would say to their 40-year-old husbands, 'Sure, honey, quit that job and write that novel.'"

Five years later, news leaked about the $8 million advance for Thirteen Moons. Bigger deals have been reported: Bill Clinton ($10 million for his memoir) and Tom Clancy ($45 million for two books). But Frazier, the one-time literary wonder, attracted more and harsher attention. Entertainment Weekly dubbed him "The $8 Million Man."

Thirteen Moons got mixed reviews. Some raved. The Los Angeles Times said it "belongs to the ages." USA TODAY wrote, "You will find much to admire and savor … but you won't love it like you did Cold Mountain." Several reviews used the word "disappointment."

Lines out of nowhere

Frazer says only, "I think the business of the book overtook the book."

He says he knew it would never be as popular as his first. Cold Mountain, boosted by the film version, has more than 4 million copies in print. Thirteen Moons— movie rights were sold, but production plans are on hold — has 750,000 copies in print.

"How often does that happen to a literary novel?" he asks of Cold Mountain's popularity. "It'd be delusional to think it would happen again."

Now, he is hoping that his third novel, Nightwoods, "can stand on its own."

In it, the two main characters stumble on a second chance to climb out of lonely lives. One of them, a young woman named Luce, hurt and toughened by life, lives alone, a caretaker of an abandoned lodge in the woods. Into her life come a niece and nephew who have witnessed their stepfather kill their mother.

The novel opens: "Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent. She learned early that it wasn't smart to leave them unattended in the yard with the chickens. Later she'd find feathers, a scaled yellow foot with its toes clenched."

Frazier says those opening lines "popped into my mind" five years ago.

He had been struggling with another historical novel that contrasted the fancy mountain 19th-century resorts for the rich escaping the heat with the working conditions of millworkers down in the valleys.

He was left with the image of an old lodge by a lake and a minor character named Luce. But once he imagined the two children, Luce grew in importance. Those opening lines raised questions:

"How and why did the kids get there? Why are they so violent and strange? … The rest of it was a matter of figuring that out."

Unlike his first two novels, he didn't have to do much research, "a lofty word," he says, "for reading a lot of stuff that can help a novel assert its own world through details."

For Nightwoods, all he had to do was make sure the music and groups mentioned in the novel, such as James Brown and the Famous Flames, were around at the right time.

Luce falls asleep each night, as Frazier did as a kid, "listening to WLAC out of Nashville, Little Willie John, Howlin' Wolf, Maurice Williams, James Brown. Magic singers proclaiming hope and despair into the dark."

Frazier has eclectic taste in music, from old-time fiddling to Gillian Welch. "If I had to give up reading or give up listening to music," he says, "I suspect I'd stick with the music."

He spent the first half of his career teaching lower-level classes at the University of Colorado and North Carolina State.

He published one short story, wrote a South American travel guide for the Sierra Club and failed to finish a contemporary novel. Then he heard his father's story about Frazier's great-great-uncle, a Confederate deserter who walked home. "It was just a paragraph, but I said, 'There's a story. It has a beginning, a middle and an end.'"

At his wife's urging, he quit teaching to write full time, which she says isn't remarkable: "I'm an old-fashioned kind of feminist. What if the (gender) roles were reversed? Would anyone make a big deal of a husband telling his wife she could stay home to write that novel? That novel that when you're 65, you wished you would have written?"

In Nightwoods, Luce talks about money: "You start wanting things too much and you need more and more money. She said she tried as much as possible to live free from the bad idea of money."

'I had an offer, and I took it'

As for his own money, Frazier says, "I'm not good talking about it because I don't think about it that much." (No one is talking about the size of his latest advance.)

His success didn't radically change his life, he says. "I was 46 when Cold Mountain came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm."

His wife did quit her job as a business professor at North Carolina State to become his live-in business manager. They moved to Asheville, near where Frazier grew up, and got a small horse farm near Ocala, Fla., now managed by their 27-year-old daughter, Annie.

As for that $8 million, Frazier says, "I had an offer, and I took it. Far be it for me to tell publishers how to run their business."

Susan Kamil, publisher and editor in chief of Random House, says only, "We don't discuss money." She notes that Thirteen Moons "made best-books-of-the-year roundups and has sold, so far, over half a million copies." Publishers Weekly estimated that to cover an $8 million advance, a publisher would need to sell 1 million copies in hardcover and 2 million paperbacks.

Kamil did say she expects "many, many" fans of Cold Mountain "will follow Charles each time he publishes" and can count on "his timeless prose, his profound sense of place and feeling for the land and the way he grounds his characters in the natural world."

For his next novel, Frazier has a "flicker of an idea" that would alternate between the present and past. But he's not ready to discuss it. "I haven't written a word yet."

And with Frazier, it's the words that matter, no matter how slowly they come.

27 Sep, 2011

--
Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNF61Lb9eaCfnxOOsiyl0mfQLDytqw&url=http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/story/2011-09-26/charles-frazier-nightwoods-cold-mountain/50561620/1
~
Manage subscription | Powered by rssforward.com