DATE: Sunday, August 3, 1997                TAG: 9707240578

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON 

                                            LENGTH:   86 lines

MOUNTAINOUS DEBUTFRAZIER'S FIRST NOVEL, ``COLD MOUNTAIN,' DRAWS TWO CIVIL WAR NARRATIVES INTO A NATURAL UNION.

COLD MOUNTAIN

CHARLES FRAZIER

Atlantic Monthly Press. 356 pp. $24.

Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain takes hold of the reader like a mournful dream, too sad to remember without a pang of regret but too stunning for the memory to fade.

It is hard to believe that this haunting novel is the first for the 46-year-old North Carolinian. Cold Mountain appears to be the kind of book that a writer comes to after an apprentice novel or two, a mid-career book that is flawless, a story of such resonance and unique character to make it a work of beauty and wisdom. The most amazing first novel I have read in years, perhaps ever, Cold Mountain is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's most recent fiction - carried along by a stream of words, brilliant characterizations and heart-stopping action.

Frazier's novel, based in part on stories passed down from his great-great-grandfather, is a narrative about a Confederate soldier, Inman, who after being wounded in battle makes his separate peace: He leaves the hospital where he is recovering and sets off on a journey home to his beloved Cold Mountain and his betrothed, Ada Monroe. As he travels home, Odysseus to Penelope, the novel shifts back and forth, one chapter detailing Inman's adventures en route and the next Ada's struggles at home.

At one point Inman says, ``It's a feverish world,'' and the novel bears him out. His journey of return is filled with the sounds and textures of the natural world, but it is also fraught with the nightmarishly real. His pilgrim's progress is halted a number of times as he encounters an assortment of humanity and a good number of the deadly sins, as well: Solomon Veasey, a preacher who is too readily tempted by the flesh; a wandering hermit woman who parked her caravan in the seclusion of a mountainside 26 years before but feels in transit nonetheless; a group of backwoods Circes who turn men into swine, making even a clear-eyed man like Inman feel ``as inert as one behexed.''

Inman is caught by the Guard, a deserter-hunting posse as cruel as the scalp hunters in McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and shot when the prisoners are executed, but rises like Lazarus from the slaughter. By the time he reaches home, he is scarred, grizzled and unrecognizable at first to Ada. He has walked through a reality as brutal and strange as one can be made to imagine.

Ada's story has been less exotic but equally moving, her wait changing her as much as Inman is changed by his unflagging determination to find his home. The 24-year-old Ada must learn to shed her Charleston upbringing and live in a new world after her father dies.

Ruby Thewes, a slight 21-year-old mountain girl who is as flinty as the mountain she knows intimately, becomes Ada's mentor and friend. Both are transformed by their friendship and their experiences together. Ruby's father, Stobrod, a man as lazy as Rip Van Winkle and as selfish as Pap Finn, is also transformed, by the Civil War and then by the fiddle music he plays. At one point he realizes, ``What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and snarl and drift but have a shape, an aim.'' Just as courage and love transform Ada and Inman, music allows Stobrod to discover his humanity.

One of the subtle miracles of Cold Mountain is that all of the minor characters are as fascinating as the two major ones. The principal narratives, focusing on Ada and on Inman, merge as gracefully as daylight and the night sky. And the stories they collect along the way become their stories. When Inman and Ada come together, their union seems inevitable, their experience undeniable, their stories as magical as the truth should be.

Finally, though, Cold Mountain is not about the expected - Odysseus returning home or Lazarus rising from the dead - but about the ``tangle and snarl'' and what we make of them. It is a novel that defies our expectations, just as the actual lives we live might, that speaks in a language all its own of great suffering that scars and powerful love that heals. MEMO: Michael Pearson is a professor of creative writing and literature

at Old Dominion University. His most recent book, ``John McPhee,'' was

published by Simon & Schuster/Macmillian. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MARION ETTLINGER

Charles Frazier grew up in two small North Carolina towns.

Graphic

SIGNING

[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]

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