Book review: ‘The Trackers,’ by Charles Frazier

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In Frazier’s portraiture, mountainous Wyoming is not so very different from mountainous western North Carolina, where he was born. Among other similarities, the explosive machismo displayed by male characters in his celebrated first novel, “Cold Mountain,” infects the Cowboy State, too. We’re only on Page 7 when Long’s foreman has decked a soused ranch hand for mouthing off.

When not painting, Val takes a keen interest in his hosts’ marriage, which instills “a feeling of something unsettled, something wrong, something hidden. I tried to separate my attraction to Eve from that feeling. Tried not to be yet another guy love-struck by the girl in the spotlight.”

Just when the way seems paved for John to be cuckolded, Frazier springs a surprise. Eve absconds and takes one of her husband’s favorite possessions, a small Renoir painting. Val becomes the first of the novel’s several trackers — that is, pursuers — when John persuades him to put the mural on hold and go find her. What Val is supposed to do if he succeeds is unclear, but John aspires to fill one of Wyoming’s U.S. Senate seats, and rumor has it that Eve and her first husband, Jake Orson, have never divorced. If so, her marriage to John is bigamous, and his candidacy is almost sure to fail.

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Acting on a tip, Val looks for her in Florida, which he excoriates as roundly as Tommy Wilhelm did Los Angeles in Saul Bellow’s novel “Seize the Day” (the resting place for “all the loose objects in the country”). For Val, Florida is the original “Wild West. … I saw the large sweep of American history as Florida’s assault on civilization.” A little later, he compares the state to “a hot towel from somebody else’s bath flung sopping across your face.”

Val receives a Floridian assault himself, courtesy of the Orsons, a clan that has produced not only Eve’s former (or perhaps still incumbent) husband, Jake, but also menfolk so hostile to outsiders that they seem to have taken lessons in menacing. The only Orson to treat Val half-decently is Eve’s putative mother-in-law. When he denies being romantically involved with Eve, Mrs. Orson takes him at his word, for if they were an item, Eve would have “gnawed you down to the knees by now.” A consensus emerges among Val’s other informers: Eve is probably somewhere on the West Coast — try Seattle, try San Francisco — and that’s where he heads next.

For readers who haven’t noticed that Frazier is working variations on noir themes, he drives the point home by having Val curl up with James M. Cain’s novel “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and gush that its first sentence — “They threw me off the hay truck about noon” — is “the best in the history of literature.” Get out of the way, Dante and Tolstoy!

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Yet Frazier never reduces Val, John, Eve or that ill-tempered foreman to stock noir characters. And the tonic Western air supplies a note of hope, causing Val to believe, at least for a while, that “we were still the imagined country whose overall movement was steadily and surely upward, like those moments in Fred and Ginger movies when everyone wears tuxedos and ball gowns, and the dancing is only lightly regulated by the laws of gravity.”

“The Trackers” ends with the far-ranging Val back in Wyoming but fed up with “the violence of the West. Not so much the physical geography, but the violence inherent in the concept of the West, the politically and culturally and religiously ordained rapacity smearing blood all over the fresh beauty.”

The book’s continental scope proves that the lavishly talented Charles Frazier is not just a regional novelist. “The Trackers” is a novel of suspense with an all-American sting.

Dennis Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Book World, lives in western North Carolina.