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Charles Frazier is the author of Cold Mountain, an international bestseller that won the National Book Award and was adapted into an Academy Award–winning film by Anthony Minghella. Frazier is also the author of the bestselling novels Thirteen Moons, Nightwoods, and Varina.
Ever since Frazier’s mega-bestselling and National Book Award-Winning novel Cold Mountain, he’s had a reputation for conjuring up fascinating periods of American history in a way that no one else can. Most recently in Varina (2018), Frazier returned to the Civil War era. The Washington Post called it, “Perfectly evocative . . . A finely wrought novel that will reward rereading. Elegiac without being exculpatory, it is an indictment of complicity without ignoring the historic complexity of the great evil at the core of American history.” And The Trackers (Ecco; available at Square Books) is an incredible continuation of his excellence. As Time said, “Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details—he has a scholar’s command of the physical realities of early America and a novelist’s gift for bringing them to life.” Now, in The Trackers, Frazier renders the Great Depression in vivid detail.
The story behind the story began ten years ago, when Frazier was struck by a photograph of two muralists at work, observed by a well-dressed couple, while researching Depression-era public art programs. To Frazier, the “photograph felt like an implied narrative, a hidden story.” The image lingered in his mind until five years later, when he began to write. The people in the photograph morphed, turning into characters. “The two men on the scaffold got whittled down to one . . . The older man in the suit became Long, a wealthy cattle rancher and former WWI sniper . . . An elder cowboy named Faro who’d lived through the violent days of the Wild West appeared. The woman in the photograph became the central character.” As he reshaped his fragmented memories of the photograph, the plot of The Trackers emerged. Years after he started writing this book, Frazier went online to find the photograph, and learned that he had “been misremembering it all along, reimagining it from the start.”
Our protagonist is Val Welch, a painter who gets a lucky break and lands a New Deal assignment to paint a mural for the new Post Office in the far-flung Dawes, Wyoming. Even better, a generous art-lover who just happens to be the richest man in town has offered to host him at his massive ranch during his stay. The rancher’s name is John Long, and he is the source of much local speculation—he’s rumored to have shady political aspirations, and his much younger wife, Eve, seems like a strange match. She spent years riding the railroads all over the country, picking up work where she could get it and even becoming a touring stage performer. Now, just as Val is really getting to know John and Eve, she takes off with a valuable painting in tow. John wants to find Eve quickly and discreetly, and he sends Val out on the road to track her down.
Frazier is incredible at taking us on these epic journeys. He’s at his best when he’s introducing us to people from all walks of life. Val shares cheap scotch with former teachers living in a homemade shack in Seattle’s Hooverville, gets his gun stolen by an unwelcoming family in the swamps of Florida, and takes in gimlets and secondhand smoke at a cramped San Francisco nightclub. This book will dispel any notion that the Great Depression affected all Americans equally. When these characters discuss political issues like corporate monopolies and packing the Supreme Court, we realize that their lives are not very far at all from our own— the mark of the best historical fiction.
