"Nightwoods" by Charles Frazier, Random House, 272 pages, $26
With his third novel -- after “Cold Mountain” and “13 Moons” -- literary heavyweight Charles Frazier returns to Appalachia but leaves behind the 19th century to set his spooky but slow-moving story in the hula-hoop and penny-loafer days of the early 1960s.
Luce, a young woman with a traumatic past, has holed up for the past three years in an abandoned lodge in the mountains of North Carolina, where she earns a small stipend as its caretaker.
Her only contact with the world around her, short of an occasional trip to the country store, is the music on the radio she listens to each night and an elderly friend from whom she’s learned many tricks about living off the land, including “hog killings, oil lamps, fetching water, outhouses, and all that other old business.”
If loneliness is a problem for Luce, the prospect of other people is a bigger one: “A distressingly large portion of the world doesn’t do you any good,” she thinks, “in fact, it does you bad. Casts static between your ears, drowns out who you really are.”
This includes her father, the town’s deputy sheriff; for reasons that will eventually surface, Luce hasn’t spoken to him since moving to the lodge.
But as the book opens, Luce’s peaceful solitude is at an end. She has become the foster mother of her sister’s young twins: “Small and beautiful and violent,” they are mute since watching their stepfather murder their mother. They’re also little firebugs who kill Luce’s chickens for fun and try to burn down the lodge.
But before Luce can discover the source of their anger, two more threats converge in her town: Her sister’s killer, Bud Johnson, a man Luce has never met and believes was executed, arrives in search of a fortune in stolen money he believes might have made its way to Luce via the twins; and a man named Stubblefield, the heir to the lodge, has come to settle his grandfather’s estate, and possibly end Luce’s way of life.
These three main characters trade off to tell the story -- but Luce’s is the voice we’ll remember long after finishing this book. Tough, practical, and in many ways an emotional mirror of the twins she’s taken on, Luce is “not much maternal,” thanks to a mother who ran off when Luce was not much older than her niece and nephew.
Maybe because she shares the twins’ distrust of the human race, it’s easier for Luce to overlook their inability to bond. Instead, through lessons about nature, subsistence farming and husbandry, she opts to teach them her own philosophy: “You try your best to love the world,” she says, “despite obvious flaws in design and execution. You take care of whatever needy things present themselves to you during your passage through it.”
This is the central theme of “Nightwoods.” The book may share some conventions with crime novels -- a murder victim, a criminal, suspense as the distance narrows between the hunter and the hunted -- but at heart its overriding concern is the stewardship of children, people, their traditions and the land that provides shelter and sustenance, both physical and spiritual.
Things build to a predictable pitch as Bud closes in on his prey and Luce sees a chance to make up for her failure to protect herself long ago -- as well as avenge her sister and save the twins.
But Frazier repeatedly slows the action with unexpected twists of plot and character development, including a budding friendship between Bud and Luce’s father, and a delicate courtship between Luce and Stubblefield. At one point, deep into the chase, Bud finds himself in a magical circle of hunters as curious as the den of nine-pen players Rip Van Winkle once disappeared into.
Frazier’s incantatory prose adds to this effect; a description of a casually violent stabbing (“essential organs lay greasy and dark against one another”) is as leisurely as the painterly details of a porch at Luce’s lodge, where “paint flaked off the stair rails and pickets in dry petals” and we see “rocking chairs equally weathered” with “sunken bottoms of twisted kraft paper woven in an intricate angular pattern by somebody now likely dead.”
"Nightwoods" draws its inspiration from mountain murder ballads that sing of Bud and his late wife’s relationship (“Little Omie Wise,” “Knoxville Girl”), films of the era (“Thunder Road,” “Cape Fear”) that underscore its plot, and fairy tales featuring dark woods, lost children and ogres (“Hansel and Gretel”).
Its characters go by their first names only and live on generic streets in a mythical Southern Shangri-La where the inhabitants wear PF Flyers, eat MoonPies and swig Cheerwine, and the hotheaded, confused villain looks an awful lot like Harry Powell of “Night of the Hunter."
This is no ordinary thriller. Then again, who needs another one of those? Frazier has taken a fast-paced genre and subverted it at every turn, offering a closer look at the nature of good and evil and how those forces ebb and flow over time.
“Luce believed that if you walk in the deep woods long enough, you’ll inevitably come to places of mystery or spirit or ritual.” Follow this story to its end, and you’ll find yourself in the same place.
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