The eminently first-world problem that can come from having a literary smash hit is that every book you write subsequently has to live within its shadow. The American writer Charles Frazier was in his late 40s when, in 1997, he published his debut novel, Cold Mountain, about a confederate army deserter during the civil war desperate to return home regardless of the punishment he’d face. It won the National Book award, sold a million copies in its first year, and was later made into a film starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. In the 26 years since, Frazier has published only three further books – Thirteen Moons, Nightwoods and Varina – none of which scaled similar heights.
The 72-year-old’s latest, The Trackers, might just experience a similar fate. It tells the curiously underwhelming tale of Val Welch, a young painter from Virginia eking out a living in Depression-era America. He travels across the country to rural Wyoming, where he is to paint a mural on the side of the town’s post office by arrangement of a wealthy local ranch owner, John Long. Long, an art lover, has political aspirations. He lives with his much younger wife, Eve, and a grizzled old cowboy hand, Faro, whose masculine manner is more wild west than the US of 1937.
When one night a stifled Eve runs away, Long, who should of course dispatch the wily Faro to find her, asks the artist to instead, this comparative stranger. Why? Who knows. And so Welch sets down his paintbrush and, mindful that he’s no private detective and has no access to GPS, sets out on her trail. An impossible task, obviously, but he nevertheless makes remarkably swift progress, first in Florida (a grim state, in Frazier’s telling, like “a hot towel from somebody else’s bath flung sopping wet across your face”), to Seattle, and then to San Francisco, where the bars are dives, and the angels have dirty faces.
Welch is an avid consumer of the news, he reads the papers, and listens to the radio, and so he’s aware of a wider world out there: the horrors of Guernica, Hitler flexing his muscles in Europe. But these are subjects for a more ambitious and far-reaching book. The most interesting character here, Eve, exists largely off the page, and so instead much detail is given over to how the business of tracking a missing person, by car, train and newfangled commercial aeroplanes, can be fraught with complication.
At one point he writes: “He can paint, but he doesn’t have anything to paint about.” One might say the same here about Frazier. He writes beautiful, burly sentences full of arid geography and heavy weather (“a black night, moonless still and half the sky clouded”), but the plot itself remains determinedly slight and, like the art Long favours, minimal: Welch given a task to which he implausibly rises, before he returns to complete his mural.
With The Trackers, Frazier has written a pretty OK book where, once, years ago now, he wrote a great one.
The Trackers by Charles Frazier is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
