This review answered the main question I always have when I read a review: would I like the book? As a reader who gets annoyed at the kinds of cliches described by Miller, the answer is no. The other thing this touches on is the state of the American novel. It is noticeable that many American authors either write about the past or write long rambling tomes crammed with pop culture references. Just being crammed with pop references or being long and rambling isn't an offense in and of itself: I enjoyed the Corrections, and I like David Foster Wallace. But after I read the Corrections I picked up Ian McEwan's Atonement. And I have to say, I thought 'now that is a story, that is mastery.' McEwan does not fall into that awful framing trap "let me tell you a story of my life, sonny boy. Before those hifalutin' trains!" The true fates of the protagonist and her characters are only revealed in the book's magnificent denouement.

To be fair, Atonement is also about the past. The author's own attempt to write about the present was in my view something of a pretty failure (Saturday).

It is thought to be impossible to write about 21st century America without making use of the great clutter and complexity of late stage captialism. I'm not so sure. I think a lot of authors attempt to do it...and wind up writing glum, ponderous little books. I'm not against glum, but I am against cliched glumness and there's a lot of that going around. Especially stories by Andre Dumas III that end up as boring, ponderous, cliched "indie" movies.

An example of devastating glumness is Coetzee's novel disgrace. Utterly devastating and glum and totally, compulsively absorbing. He manages to write about our present moment as much as about South Africa's present moment, where life in the aftermath of apartheid resists easy explanation. There is no moral clarity, no winning the "battle" between Liberals and Conservatives, the issues we deal with resist easy moralizing. I think that's the attractiveness of historical novels...the authors (and their readers) have a chance to look backward and make sense of THAT historical moment. Persepctive on one's current situation in the world, after all, is tough to come by.

I must have been if I confused him with Dubus III.

I am rarely rendered speechless in appreciation of the sublime. Usually my praise has the opposite tendency, to an unintentional grandiloquence.

But in response to Laura Miller's truly incisive and brilliant review of 'Thirteen Moons', to wax ornate would be a pointless afterthought.

So let me just thank her for the guise-less virtuosity of her writing, and Salon for publishing it.

Waiting for the Barbarians is brilliant, as is In the Heart of the Country. I would rather re-read either of these books than read The Corrections once.

You want glum? Try the new Cormac McCarthy. It's as glum as glum can get. I needed a drink when it was over. But I'd rather read Blood Meridian for the 4th time than read Charles Frazier for the first time.

Just another opinion...

Miller calls the erasure of the Cherokee "a real tragedy", but then wonders if all aspects of this really need to be rehashed again. It "feels familiar", she says, as though genocide were some literary trope. It was a good review, but that really makes me angry. People should be aware of what happened, and things like popular authors engaging the subject is exactly what it takes to reach ignorant people. Genocide ought not be ignored, no matter how "familiar" it feels.

This review is so thoroughly condescending that I feel virtually compelled to look at the book for myself.

I just finished Miller's review, having stopped several times to consider that I hadn'

t read such a well-written and engaging review in a long-long while. So, I was really surprised,just now, to read some of the letters criticizing it.

How odd. I had just thought "If I were still teaching, I'd take her review to class, just to demonstrate how a person should talk about books".

Am I the only person who also thinks this lady is also very funny? I loved that line about Jim Harrison and Frazier......

Oh well.....

david terry dterrydraw@aol.com

www.davidterryart.com

... I thought all the detailed bits about how to chop wood and cook 19th century country food pretty boring when I read Cold Mountain. It reminded me of Anna Karenina, when, smack in the middle of a raging soap opera there's this hideously long chapter about MOWING WHEAT! Aaaahhhh! Ditto for Little House on the Prairie ... loved the drama, hated the picking vegetables bits. Also, I felt like Cold Mountain was a bit ... self-important. Perhaps because it was about 19th century people chopping their own wood and cooking their own hand picked vegetables. I feel like the National Book Awards has its share of winners who tell us about plucky, down trodden Americans who chop their own wood and are stoic and do boring things for themselves in the middle of nowhere (see for example 1981's "Plains Song" which I randomly read right before Cold Mountain and "All The Pretty Horses" which verges on camp in my own special opinion). It's wishful thinking, I guess (i.e. "This is who Americans really are!!"). But doesn't make for a terribly exciting or inventive read.

I always thought that "Cold Mountain" was really a western masquerading as a Civil War novel.

This was a great review. It made me want to read the book just to enjoy what is good about it and see if I agree of the analysis of its weaknesses.

I enjoyed reading Laura Miller’s review.

I tried to answer for myself why so few current best-selling literary novels are based in the present.

The characters in ‘Thirteen Moons’ and ‘Cold Mountain’ are part of a “small world”, their social interactions being limited to a select group of people. They have a chance to defend themselves against most aggressors. They live in a land where their actions can change their environment. This lends itself to telling a story .

Today it is hard to imagine changing even a modicum of our environment. There are too many intertwining communal relationships for a single relationship or action to have great import. We have become drone-like. Story telling is more difficult.

A literary novel based in the present may only be believable (or interesting) if it is based on close, immediate relationships. We can not wander the land, living historically important episodes (the exception being if we roam a “third world” country, which is like going into our past).

Characters in ‘Thirteen Moons’ and ‘Cold Mountain’ could dream. And they had hope. What can we dream about nowadays? And what do we hope for?

(Perhaps it is easier or more profitable to write of sweeping times than to write about the angst, serenity, and blah of modern relationships?)