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In Will Cooper, Charles Frazier has brought to life a narrator and protagonist whose life story gathers many of the forces that shaped our nation in the 19th century: greed, ambition, shrewd intelligence, romance and racism. THIRTEEN MOONS manages to be both a crowd pleaser and an historical illumination, all in one nearly century-spanning novel.
The book opens with Will an old man, awaiting his final journey to the Nightland, "where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel." But before he goes, this lifelong writer and frontier hero wishes to dispel a few myths by sharing his own story, and he reaches back into his boyhood to begin. Sold into bondage as a 12-year-old orphan, Will follows his uncle's map west into the "blank space" of the Indian territories, to run a trading post for his master. But not before acquiring a little Latin, a working knowledge of poker and an unquenchable taste for books, all of which stand him in good stead in his future life as capitalist, country lawyer and devoted lover of Claire, a mixed-breed girl he possesses for one shining young summer and loves until he dies.
Trading furs and ginseng roots with local Indians for pots and whiskey, he quickly learns the Cherokee language, and earns the affection of Bear, the chief. Despite Will's great love for Bear, he is unsentimental about the Indian way of life in the early 1800s, when he was young: "We need Noble Savages for our own purposes. Our happy imaginings about them and the pure world they occupied do us good when incoherent change overwhelms us. But even in those early days when I was first getting to know Bear and his people, I could see that change and brutal loss had been all they had experienced for two centuries."
Despite his white skin, Will regards himself as Cherokee from the time Bear adopts him into his clan. Over the years it becomes clear from the proliferating forts that the US government is intent on moving the Indians even farther west. Wealthy Indians and part-Indians (like Claire and her protector Featherstone) leave with their slaves and property, but many of the dirt farmers stay until they are literally hunted down. Will is caught between his allegiance to Bear and his clan, who "legally" own land, and the rest of the Nation, being dismantled to accommodate new white settlers. In 1938, the summer of the infamous Trail of Tears, Will must choose between the interests of his own clan and the rights of other Indians he has known all his life.
Intriguing as the plot is, it's the writing that seduces. Frazier, through Will, makes the reader see and feel the natural world as few authors can. Granny Squirrel's cabin "was pressed down into the head of the cove as tight as a tick in the intricate folds of a hound's ear." Words long unused lend magic to the prose, as in this description of the bets in a crucial card game: "There were doubloons, guineas, livres, pistareens, florins, ducats, Dutch dog dollars, Scotch marks, Portuguese half joes, Peruvian crossdollars, and even one old smooth-worn bezant." Who could not cherish the word "beeves" and the story that encompasses it? There's even a fabulous duel between Will and the wily Featherstone, and Will generously provides us three versions of it, so you can pick the one you like.
This sweeping historical novel has something for nearly everyone. Romance fans can swoon with Will: "I held her and it was like falling down a well." History buffs and cynics can wallow in the already-corrupt political life of Washington City, where Will travels to try and sway the government's position on relocation: "I soon saw how the business was done but realized I did not have the money to do it very well." Wild game aficionados can vicariously enjoy a meal: "Charley had a pattern to eating a squirrel. He kept it on its skewer and worked back to front, eating the little hams first, each by each, and then he went at the body meat, eating it off the ribs as if it lay in rows like corn kernels. When he finally got to the head, he broke it off and put it in his mouth and worked it around for quite some time like he was gumming tobacco." (Admit it: the 13-year-old boy inside you thinks that's cool.)
I wasn't surprised to learn this morning that THIRTEEN MOONS has just landed on the New York Times bestseller list in position two. Its ambitious scope and fluid prose will delight fans of Frazier's COLD MOUNTAIN and probably garner many more. Vivid and sprawling, it leaves you wondering: who will they cast in the movie?
--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol
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