Nightwoods

I just finished reading Charles Frazier’s Nightwoods and was impressed more than with any book in recent memory. The style is almost indescribable, poetic perversity, dialogue that makes do without quotation marks, blending thought and phrase in patternless patterns, moving back and forth in layers of time, using the richness of Southern smells and tastes and backwoods foliage as background for the story. Southern writers all seem to pay homage to the father of all Southern writing, William Faulkner, in their layering of time and relationships, the intricate interweaving of gray and blue, of black and white. Poe might be considered the real father of gothic writing, but his wasn’t Southern gothic as in Faulkner, just wildly weird, a kind of psychological southland. And Twain predates Faulkner, but Huck and Tom aren’t as Southern eccentric as most of Faulkner’s characters. James Lee Burke’s Louisiana comes close, and James Dickey’s deep-mountain dueling banjos is also near, but only in Deliverance. Tennessee Williams is parallel on stage, and Erskine Caldwell in God’s Little Acre and Tobacco Road. But no one does it like Faulkner. And now we have Charles Frazier, who won fame with his first novel, Cold Mountain. We have, in Nightwoods, a tale of two strange children sent to live with an aunt in a lake lodge she caretakes, on a lake across from a North Carolina village. It’s set in the 1960’s, but it could be any time, as all times in the South seem to be the same. The villain is Bud, the man who married Luce’s sister and then murdered her. The romantic angle is Stubblefield, who has returned to oversee his grandfather’s holdings, part of which is the lodge Luce takes care of. But at the center of the story are the twins, strange Southern children who speak a secret language but only to each other, who love fire and its cleansing power, who are the only witnesses to the murder of their mother. And Bud wants to find them and the thousands of dollars their mother stole from him. Do I recommend this book? You bet I do. Will I find and read his other two novels, Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons? You bet I will.