Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long tiem gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her there at the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.

Inman, gravely injured at the Battle of Petersburg, walks out of a Confederate hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina. He's on his way back to his small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where his sweetheart Ada is. Though the war is in its death throes, violence is still the order of the day, and the road is a difficult one, beset by murderers and thieves, the worst of which are the Home Guard who go around pressing men into fighting a lost battle. Back in Cold Mountain, Ada is alone, having recently suffered the death of her father. She has no idea how to operate his farm, and comes close to starvation, before a local cornpone named Ruby comes to help her get things in working order. Together, they bring new life to the farm and a new way forward for Ada.

The obvious model for Cold Mountain is The Odyssey. Inman is the Odysseus figure, who vanquishes a series of enemies and monsters en route to his home and his Penelope. The moment when Inman, having crossed hundreds of miles on foot, is captured by the Home Guard and returned to the east, struck me as a pointed analog of the bag of Aeolian winds that drive Odysseus back in the direction that he came. Inman is capable, taciturn, even brave, but he has little of Odysseus' cleverness or grandiloquence; he's a small and private man who has become caught up with the great machine of war without his own choosing.

More interesting, actually, is thinking of Ada as Penelope. In The Odyssey, Penelope suffers at the hands of the suitors who devour all her food and resources. Ruby is a kind of anti-suitor, who arrives to make the estate multiply. Together, they build a kind of female utopia that would be unthinkable without the war and and the absence of men. Queer theorists might have much to say about the affection between Ada and Ruby; when Inman does return (as you know he will), Ruby tries to convince Ada that he's not needed, that they can thrive on their own. Ruby's love for Ada (if not Ada's for Ruby) approaches the romantic. The arrival of men, whether Inman, the Home Guard, or Ruby's rakish father Stobrod, is a threat to the utopia; Inman's return reinscribes Ada into a familiar kind of hetero union. (This is predictable enough; more disappointing is the post-script which does the same for Ruby.)

I was enthralled and impressed by Cold Mountain's version of the Confederate South, which manages to express the extent of ambivalence about the cause and purpose of the war without excusing or minimizing it. Inman is forced to shoot and kill a group of union soldiers, but his real enemies are the Home Guard--the real enemies, that is, are at Home--and Captain Teague, their sadistic leader, who shows up predictably to force the narrative conclusion. Among those Southerners Inman encounters on his odyssey are staunch true-believers and anti-Confederates, not to mention freed and enslaved Black people, but most white people he meets are somewhere in between, half-hearted in their pride and wearied by the length of a deadly and destructive war. This destruction, more than anything, is the central fact of the novel's landscape. Much of that destruction is self-inflicted--Frazier pointedly makes Ada the scion of Charleston elites, the kind of people one might say are the real drivers of the war--and we see ironically how the misguided defense of slavery has unraveled the precious social fabric that had been previously so rigid.

Frazier's writing is excellent, often lovely, only infrequently sentimental. The love story at the heart of the novel moves with the force of novelist predestination; even the spoilable moment where the novel ultimately diverges from the shape of The Odyssey seemed inevitable to me. I liked how the romance between Inman and Ada was made of small things--a handful of pre-war encounters, a single kiss--that are blown up to immense size during their long separation. I liked, too, the depth of the moment where they stumble upon each other once again--and, having changed so much, don't recognize the other.