Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier - Book Review

When Charles Frazier’s second novel, Thirteen Moons, begins, it captures an old man’s yearning for a tragic love and how the loss of this love has shaped a man. Moons is a resoundingly mythic tale, wonderfully told by the aged orphan named Will Cooper, who begins his autobiography reminiscing of life before his life-long love changed everything. At the age of twelve, he embarked on a journey into the Cherokee Nation with a key to a store and a life waiting to be unlocked. Unfortunately, Frazier’s final act storytelling becomes as disenchanting as Cooper’s failures later in life. The novel falls into a somber wallow near the end, when Cooper, and Frazier it seems, grow tired of hoping for the vision that could have been.

Pros

• Frazier writes fiction and myth with such detail and skill, it’s as if it were America’s untold history.
  
• Frazier combines a romantic and realistic outlook of the Indians who inhabited the Appalachian Mountains with respect and honesty.
  
• Will Cooper is of the grand lineage of classic woodsman like Davy Crockett and Natty Bumppo.
  
• The beautiful and grandiose writing can pause to reflect on the complexity of life and the mystery of nature as if admiring the divine.

Cons

• The story loses its sense of direction and purpose two-thirds of the way through.
  
• Will’s relationship with Claire is a bit too overwrought to begin with and then falls under the weight of its expectations.
  
• As Will loses interest in his own life, the reader loses interest in where he’ll end up or what he’ll do.

Description

• As a means to pay a debt, young Will Cooper must run a trading post near the Cherokee nation.
  
• On his way to the post, Will encounters Claire, a woman he will continue to chase after his entire life.
  
• Will learns the way of life from two very different Indian fathers: the harsh and amusing Featherstone and the quiet, honorable Bear.
  
• By the time his tale ends, Will becomes the 19th century American Renaissance man: an honorary tribesman, a frontiersman, a lawyer, a colonel, a senator, and a legend.
  
• Will’s life grows and fades in the midst of the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

"It is good to be shifty in a new country." – Capt. Simon Suggs

This mischievous quote begins Thirteen Moons with a wink as Charles Frazier introduces the reader to Will Cooper, his new muse who has more gumption and fight than any character he has created before. With a knowing nod to James Fenimore Cooper, Frazier recreates the mythological frontiersman, showing the late author how he should have written Last of the Mohicans if he really wanted to fascinate readers about a white man among the Cherokee. Will Cooper is a rascally new persona all his own, full of wit, bite, and a sad, knowing introspection that stays with him long into old age.

Now if only Frazier could have sustained Cooper’s story with energetic winsome until the end.

The beginning of Moons is filled with a sense of wonder and passion and Frazier masterfully interjects unique facts and snippets from history to create the wildly beautiful and mysterious mountain terrain of the Cherokee. But once Will makes a terrible choice with the love of his life and the Indians are beginning to be forced out West, the story loses its inspiration and Frazier and Cooper both seem deflated, only willing to let the story trudge on because they have no other choice. Tales of adventure, romance, and brotherhood turn into wanderlust and a life eroding away.

Perhaps Frazier was mirroring Will’s story with that of the Cherokee Nation’s own dissolve into the mist. But this didn’t mean that the tale needed to crawl to its conclusion. Thirteen Moons had the potential to be even greater than Frazier’s National Book Award Winner, Cold Mountain, and is for most of the story because of Cooper and his sharp narration. But sadly, Cooper’s (and Frazier’s) vitality grows cold before the Thirteen Moon descends.