The tale of a native son

After reading Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons, there is only one question left to answer: Will Hollywood tap age-appropriate stars Paul Newman or Clint Eastwood as protagonist Will Cooper or will it instead let Ben Affleck and Matt Damon wrestle for the rights?

If a bonus question is permitted, what are the chances Renée Zellweger might be induced to take on the role of Claire, Cooper's haughty love interest?

Before we get to the inevitable movie two or three years hence, it should be noted that Mr. Frazier has written an uneven historical novel a decade after debuting with the bestseller "Cold Mountain." His ascent in 1997 came out of nowhere, propelled by word-of-mouth, rave reviews, and all-star applause from John Berendt and Willie Morris.

Things have changed: Frazier's new novel is known as much for the $8 million advance it fetched as for its subject matter.

Much like his previous book, "Thirteen Moons" alternates between terrifying random violence, rapaciousness, unrequited love, and a relentless fixation on the natural world that proves to be alternately cloying and wondrous.

When Frazier hits the right note, he dazzles, as in this passage early in the novel. "Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still harmless."

Cooper, inspired by William Holland Thomas, offers a firsthand account spanning the dying days of frontier wildness through the Civil War and on to the arrival of telephones and automobiles. Think of him as a less-beloved male sibling to Allan Gurganus's bawdy Confederate widow, recast as Oldest Living Cherokee Tells All.

As with "Cold Mountain," much of the novel takes place in, and describes in minute detail, the mountains of western North Carolina.

To be sure, Cooper's résumé is intriguing: a white boy sold into service at age 12 at an Indian trading post by an aunt and uncle, forced to wander through the wilderness, and eventually adopted by a Cherokee tribesman.

Later on, Cooper dabbles in jobs ranging from self-made legal eagle to state senator, with ample time devoted to lobbying in Washington on behalf of the Cherokees. He also boasts an impressive business career built on an expanding chain of trade and general stores and dabbles in lucrative land speculation.

Frazier's narrator is gifted when roaming the mountains and dense forests of the Appalachians. He proves equally adept with cultural endeavors, rummaging through favored Latin verses, quoting Byron and, in Lincolnesque fashion, spending cold winter nights exhausting the works of Cervantes, Homer, Virgil, and other literary eminences.

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