In little over a month, ““Cold Mountain’’ has stormed to No. 9 on The New York Times best-seller list, thanks largely to word of mouth. The success of a novel as unabashedly lovely as this one is a gift to a beleaguered publishing industry - particularly for independent booksellers who live, and more often die, on the sales of literary fiction. ““Cold Mountain’’ concerns a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman. Early on, Inman deserts from a hospital in Raleigh and treks across North Carolina to his home at Cold Mountain. He dodges the vicious Home Guard, which hunts down deserters, and daydreams of Ada, whom he means to marry if she’ll have a man as shellshocked as he.
The national media have been slow to review the novel - last month NEWSWEEK’S Malcolm Jones called it ““an astonishing debut, a genuinely romantic saga that attains the status of literature’’ - but regional papers have spoken in unison. As the Raleigh News & Observer put it, "” “Cold Mountain’ is as close to a masterpiece as American writing is going to come these days.’’ There are now 150,000 copies of Frazier’s novel in print. Vintage has bought the paper- back rights for $300,000. And UA/MGM recently snapped up the movie rights for $1.25 million. The movie will be directed by Anthony Minghella, who brought you ““The English Patient.’’ Frazier doesn’t know Minghella’s work, but Michael Ondaatje, who wrote the ““English Patient’’ novel, called with a character reference.
All the attention is hard for a man who’s warm but admittedly private - a man who unlisted his phone number long before anyone actually wanted it. ““I think Chuck is stunned,’’ says his friend Kaye Gibbons, the North Carolina novelist. ““I saw him the other night at the biggest book signing I’ve ever seen. More people came to that than came to Dan Quayle’s.’’ That signing took place at Quail Ridge Books, in Raleigh, which has now sold 1,277 copies of ““Cold Mountain.’’ Frazier signed for more than an hour that night. First-edition collectors asked him to sign and date his book just so. Others had bought stacks of the novel to give as gifts and wondered if he’d write Christmas messages. One fan asked Frazier’s 12-year-old daughter to sign the dedication page, which reads, ““For Katherine and Annie.’’ ““Afterward Annie said, “I was so nervous, Daddy - I didn’t know whether I should print or not’.''
What’s most instructive about Frazier’s march is that he wrote his novel without a single thought about the marketplace - not easy when the media increasingly fetishize the art of the deal (as we did a couple of paragraphs back). Frazier grew up in tiny towns at the foot of Cold Mountain, the son of a high-school principal. He studied literature - ““I plead guilty to a Ph.D.’’ - and was teaching college lit courses part time when he read a family history his father was writing. One paragraph mentioned a great-great-uncle, W. P. Inman, whose Civil War odyssey became the core of his novel.
Frazier began scouring archives and libraries for 19th-century journals and letters. (For him, research is a religion.) He had always been his daughter’s at-home parent while Katherine, the real wage earner, worked as an accounting professor. Frazier quit teaching altogether in the early ’90s. He concentrated on raising show ponies - Annie’s a state-champion rider - and writing ““Cold Mountain’’ while his daughter was at school. When Annie got home, she’d read whatever Dad had written for the day out loud. Frazier wanted his prose to sound like the old folks he knew as a child: ““There was a kind of music to their voices. I was listening to an old interview with [bluegrass legend] Bill Monroe recently, and his voice . . . I mean, he was answering a question, but it sounded like he was singing.''
By now Frazier had met Kaye Gibbons, thanks to a Montessori school car pool. ““I knew he was working on a novel,’’ she remembers. ““He was being very secretive, but his wife wanted me to read it, so she smuggled 100 pages over here. I read it and I was astounded.’’ Gibbons helped Frazier snag a young agent, Leigh Feldman. Before Christmas of 1995, Atlantic Monthly Press bought the unfinished manuscript for six figures. (Frazier’s editor, Elisabeth Schmitz, is the house’s subsidiary-rights director and had never bought a book before.)
Atlantic made their money back immediately with international sales. So they bought ads, invited Frazier to a dinner with booksellers and widely circulated advance copies of his novel. They also collected book-jacket endorsements so reverential they border on the comic (from Rick Bass: ““It seems even possible to never want to read another book . . . ‘’). "” “Cold Mountain’ came out of the gate selling,’’ says Grove/ Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin. ““I think that’s because it’s a beautiful book and because there’s still a network of people in this industry with big mouths.’'
The Fraziers’ dinner table has a giant lazy susan on it, and as you sit to eat, Katherine warns you that it may knock your drink over when it goes around. She’s made pizza and salad, though fixing dinner usually falls to her husband. ““I didn’t know you could cook, Mom,’’ Annie says, only half joking. The family falls into a funny, easy conversation. Tomorrow, when Frazier returns from a peaceful run to the library, here’s what he will find in his living room: a reporter from a British newspaper, an urgent message from his agent and plane tickets for London, where he’ll give readings and have dinner with Minghella and producer Sydney Pollack. But now, at dinner, he’s clearly a man who likes his life too much to let anyone change it. Not that people won’t try. Katherine looks down at the lazy susan and then up again. ““Are you ready to spin?''
