Poured Over: Charles Frazier on The Trackers

By Jenna Seery / April 11, 2023 at 6:00 am

“I never start a book out with ideas. I always start a book out with people in places, and what could happen here.”

Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, brings readers to the Great Depression-era American West with impeccably researched history in his new novel, The Trackers, featuring a vivid cast holding secrets and ambitions that transcend the past. Frazier talks about the photograph that inspired the characters, the excitement and drama of book tours, taking his time to get the language right and more with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Featured Books (Episode)
The Trackers by Charles Frazier
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Ava’s Man by Rick Bragg

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I met Charles Frazier a really long time ago and we’re going to explain that as we go. But The Trackers is his new novel, you may remember Varina a couple of years ago. And now we are in the Great Depression and Chuck, you’ve written a noir set in the Great Depression. Before we go anywhere, let’s start with that. How did we get here? How did The Trackers come about?

Charles Frazier

I’ve been thinking about this book and working on this book with interruptions for 10 years at least. And, and I don’t know what it would have been if I just worked straight through 10 years ago, once COVID happened, a lot of what I had planned was just clearly not going to work, the usual, just go in places doing essentially, location scouting, I had a big trip to Wyoming planned and, you know, that just didn’t happen. In 2020 and 2021, I started thinking about how the novel could be recast a little bit with places that I could just work purely off of memory. And I mean, the West is one of those places, that Rocky Mountain West. We lived in Colorado for most of the 80s and when I was a kid, we went to Wyoming or Colorado or both every summer and my dad was a school administrator, so back then they had big chunks of time in the summer. So I had spent a lot of time out there.

We’ve got a cast of four characters and four main characters, let’s call it, we’ve got a painter called Val, we’ve got an aspiring Senator/Rancher/Eastern transplant, which we’re gonna get back to, a guy called Long, he’s also a veteran of the war. Long’s younger wife Eve, who has a wild backstory. And then there’s also a cowboy who works with Long on his ranch called Pharaoh. And I think we need to start with Val because I suspect that Val was the first character that sort of fully formed, while you were noodling around with this manuscript for 10 years.

The three main characters kind of came around at the same time. But I probably spent more time with Val early on, because he’s telling the story, I never really thought of him as the main character, he’s the guy who’s observing, he prefers to be a little distant from what he’s observing. But then he’s not able to do that, as the story goes on. I had no sense, this photograph I saw that had these characters in it. That’s the first thing 10 years ago that I saw, that photograph of WPA painters in a little post office, and you could kind of see that the mural that was being worked on had cowboys and mountains and plains, and that it was just the those three people, the painter, up on a scaffold working the older guy, and a woman that and all I could think was, you know, there’s a story here, who are these three people, you know, what could their relationships turn out to be, but getting the storyteller right was the kind of the first main thing.

Val has come out from the East Coast, this is clearly his first experience of sort of the West in this great mythological sense. You know, we’re still living with that legacy, as well. But he Val’s a little naive, he’s not hapless, but he’s a little naive. Has he’s been left at the altar. His fiancée has said, sorry, pal, this is about to be a mistake, I’m going to run off and marry this other guy. So he’s a little bit loose ends, but he’s also there aren’t any jobs at the moment. I mean, it’s the Great Depression. He’s got a professor, a former art professor who has set him up nicely. And here he is in the Wild West living in a bunkhouse, kind of unprepared for what has happened to him.

Yeah. Yeah, he doesn’t know the West. His benefactor in the New Deal programs, who’s given him a chance, has said don’t screw up kid. So he’s got pressure on and then he’s staying out at this, this big ranch with a wealthy Eastern art collector rancher. So he’s, he’s in over his head from the minute he takes the train West.

And he has no idea, which is actually fun for us as readers and I just want to mention, we are going to stay spoiler free in this conversation because you really have written a very classic noir. I mean, there is a femme fatale who we’re going to get to in a second, there is sort of the wronged husband, and then there’s Val, our narrator, who’s a little like, not quite sure what’s happening. And, you know, I know I raised Pharaoh earlier than maybe I should have this cowboy, but he has this sort of grounded awareness that when it’s played against Val, it’s pretty striking. Pharaoh’s a good dude. I mean, he’s, he’s who he is, but he’s a good dude. But I do I want to talk about the sort of power bit because you are essentially writing about a giant power struggle, you’re just doing it in a different way. So let’s talk about John Long and let’s talk about his wife, Eve, who is much younger than he is.

05:42

Yeah, he’s from a wealthy family, well-educated back east and always solid, I can’t remember whether even specified it but sort of the Boston area somewhere that way. And he doesn’t get along with his family. He doesn’t like them much. And there was this piece of family property, this gigantic hunk of Wyoming land that one of his wealthy ancestors in the 19th century, just bought on a whim. And he discovers a way to kind of disconnect from his family by settling his inheritance with that land and goes out there to be a rancher. And then, and then eventually discovers he, he really wants a little more power than, than running a ranch gives him.

I had a thought when you were sort of laying this out early in the book. I was like, Oh, he’s a second son, because that’s what second sons did, right. They went west. That was, that was the only thing either, you know, join the priesthood or go west. And have you been to the Huntington Library recently? Or like in the last, like, 10 years, okay. So there’s a new gallery and this I was there maybe six months ago, and this is in Pasadena. And it’s a fabulous resource, and but at the same time, I walked in, and there were all of these very puritanical portraits from New England and upstate New York. And I was like, none of this belongs, all of this art. This is the art that I grew up with, you know, seeing in tiny museums across New England, you know, being trotted there as a as a school kid. And it doesn’t belong. And to a certain extent, John Long doesn’t necessarily belong. I mean, this is a guy who’s got a Renoir and a Matisse in the entryway of his very big ranch. Like that’s not necessarily what you think of when you think of the American West.

a few Remingtons, but it’s mainly things you wouldn’t expect. And it’s stuff that he bought in France after World War One, when you could did a bunch of reading about this, you could you could buy some of those things dirt cheap in the years right after.

So, his wife Eve, who we discover is a runaway and a hobo kid, which we’re going to come back to the research you had to do on hobo kids, because I didn’t think I understood that it was a lot of teenagers who were riding the rails during the Great Depression, I think I assumed everyone was sort of an adult. But again, I grew up in an era where, you know, children were children, and a 16-year-old was in high school. Like, we just didn’t have the sort of conceptual wherewithal to understand exactly what was going on here. But she was also a girl singer and cowboy.

Well, let me say a little bit about that teenage hobo thing. There were there were literally hundreds of thousands of teenagers, some as young as 12, out hitchhiking and catching freight trains going from place to place following the seasons of agriculture work. And a lot of these kids had never been more than 30 or 40 miles away from home, and all of a sudden, they’re on their own, seeing, you know, the parts of the world they never expected to see and that first part of that was very exciting in a lot of cases. And then the reality set in of what a desperate situation they’re in. There’s a really great book, published in the late 30s. Called Boy and Girl Tramps of America by a guy named Minehan. He was a graduate student at University of Chicago and could pass for a teenager and he went out and traveled with them and it’s just an amazing book and I had to scan it into my phone page by page because there wasn’t even a used copy on on the internet. But University Press of Mississippi has just republished that book so it’s available suddenly.

Eve, who becomes our femme fatale, she I have to say, I’m really fond of this character. I’m really fond of her. She’s a little ahead of her time. She’s certainly more worldly than Val, and she knows it. I mean, that’s kind of the fun of it. But for you, I mean, you’re playing these characters off against each other. But you’ve always been really clear that narrative voice is also a character for you. And in any of the novels. I mean, this is your fifth book. There’s a playfulness on the page with this book that I haven’t necessarily seen in the earlier novels. I mean, it’s just so clear, you’re having a ball writing. It is so clear, but okay, how do you balance the needs, though, of the story? And how do you let the characters do what they’re going to do without running amok? I mean, I know you do research, I know you like to take a lot of notes. But you said you also lost the notebook early on, when you’re doing a ton of research.

Yeah, it took years to find that photograph that was kind of the very spark of this. I liked this set of characters, these four, these four people, and I saw that Pharaoh’s old enough to be Eve’s grandfather, old enough to be Long’s father and Val’s, grandfather, and just finding these, these triangles with the different combinations of those characters. And realizing pretty early on, that Eve was kind of the apex of all of the triangles. She’s the main character, Val’s the storyteller, she’s the one that’s, that’s motivating all of them. She’s driving the story for all three of them.

I think Long resents it more than Val does. I mean, if you know anything about noir and we are going spoiler free, but at the same time, there are some patterns that noir will follow. And there’s some really satisfying stuff that happens in this book. And there’s a lot of, I mean, we end up in Florida for a minute chasing a lead. And that was really lucky, he got out of there with all of his fingers, and all of his ears and everything else. And we’ll leave it for listeners to discover what happens. But there’s a roughness to this story. And I think it felt, for me, at least as a reader, that part of that is capturing the American West when you’re also playing with the idea, though, that it’s all a myth, that none of it is like we’re taught to believe this story of the big shouldered American West. And really, we’re all still a little hapless in a way.

I enjoyed playing with that myth. And that, you know, that people in the little town of Dawes have stories about Pharaoh, that he was the young soldier who stabbed Crazy Horse with a bayonet and killed him, that he was the young gunslinger down in New Mexico during the Johnson County War, I guess the name is, that Billy the Kid made his name in and that he helped Billy not be killed and escape to Mexico. And he’ll deny those stories and then he offers a little hint now and then that like, yeah, maybe I’m not telling you the entire truth here. And but he’s, he’s consistent in ridiculing Val, or anybody else who wants to look at that 19th century west as this mythological time. He just sees it as a whole lot of it is stupid and violent.

Nostalgia is something that you’ve always sort of poked at in all of the books. I mean, when you look at Cold Mountain, for instance, I mean, not a civil war novel. I mean, you’re talking about the consequences of war and the impact of war on individual people. Yes, it happens to be set in that period. But a Thirteen Moons, Nightwoods, and certainly Varina, I mean, you are playing with people’s nostalgia for moments that— you know, nostalgia can be a warm, fuzzy feeling. Sure, but it can also be used as a weapon. And the idea that you’re in there sort of going, hey, wait a minute, slow your roll people. We need to sit and think about this. It feels like that is always going to be the spine of a Charles Frazier novel no matter what period you’re working in. I mean, Nightwoods, 1960s. Like, yeah, we’re in Appalachia, but not quite what I was expecting. So you know that and the isolation of your characters, right? Like I know, you just said Eve is the pinnacle of each of these, traces the apex of each of these triangles, but everyone is so isolated, they’re isolated by their own secrets, they’re isolated by what they want, they’re isolated by what they don’t know. Oh, yeah, they don’t know what they don’t know. Yeah, that’s a lot to put into a book and not get in the way of the story, Chuck, a lot. We talked about structure, can we talk about craft, can we talk about how we get, because you’re playing with time, in some books and others, you’re playing more with character and memory, and, but it always comes back to time, doesn’t it?

I don’t do a lot of planning. A lot of that stuff just arises out of the time, the situation, the characters in the place. And I never start a book out with ideas, I always start a book out with people in places, and what could happen here. What could happen among these people, and in this location, wherever that that happens to be, and the time and like with this book, in terms of the time, I didn’t go out looking for similarities between the Depression and now. But they kind of beat you over the head at some point. I’m just working with those with those basic connections. And I trust that those that those ideas arise out of those elements, if I immerse myself enough into that, that the characters will tell me what, what the books about and that kind of thing, if I listen to them carefully enough.

So you’re constantly surprised when you’re writing them?

I mean, gosh, I really didn’t know anything other than the three characters in the West when I started this, yeah, I would feel so constrained. I always go into a book from the start being just for the first at least two years, being just extremely self-indulgent. Like, I’m not thinking about time, I’m not thinking, Oh, it’s a waste of time for me to go to the library and spend days looking for this one little thing. I just do it. And then at some point, over the last two years, I tried to be really, really brutal with myself and not fall in love with anything for a little while there and be willing to cut. I was doing a book thing one time and somebody in the question & answer period said, said I think writers can be categorized as “put-er-inners” or “take-er-outers” and I think you’re a “put-er-inner” And I said, Would it surprise you to know, I think this was Thirteen Moons, that that I threw away 300 pages of material on this book. He was like, he couldn’t believe it. This woman in the back said, mind telling me where you threw it. But anyway, I do. I, probably on this book, I may have had close to upwards of 200 pages of leftovers that I just decided to get rid of it in the last year.

Yes. Somewhere in my research, as I was prepping for the show. You were getting ready to write Cold Mountain, you hadn’t written Cold Mountain yet. You were working on a novel set in the present day. So this was like late 80s. You know, because we didn’t have Cold Mountain yet. And you were working on sort of a present-day novel where a husband was chasing his runaway wife and I just started to laugh. I’m like, oh, man, have you been thinking about? Did you recycle?

I mean, you’re absolutely right, it never occurred to me, that that book, okay, I’ve got a story here. That book. Yeah, it was a wife, present time, who ran off with a sort of survivalist kind of cult to an enclave they had in Mexico. And he’s, he’s kind of a little bit of a wayless guy too. And he, he chases her to Mexico and I got about that far. I went to Wyoming while I was working on that book and had a cabin in Jackson Hole. And I was supposed to be working on that book and I wrote the first bits that ever became Cold Mountain, in that cabin in Wyoming.

So we’re gonna segue for a second, cuz you and I have been laughing about this for a while now. But so we’re taping this, you know, in March of 2023. And you know, we’re just a few weeks out from the publication of Trackers. And we’re also coming up on the 27th or 26th, no 26th anniversary of Cold Mountain and that book is now roughly the age I was when I worked on your tour. When I sent you all over North America.

Oh my god that tour went on forever.

It did it. You were really good sport.

Yeah, the paperback didn’t come out till over a year and a half after the hardcover. And I was just traveling all the time. But I remembered. I think I was in San Francisco, and I was running on empty. And I finally said, Miwa, from the first thing you want me to do in the morning, till the last thing you need me to do at night, needs to be no more than 18 hours. And you were like, really?

Yeah, but we got there. We got. We got there. We got you on all the planes and all the trains and all that. I was trying to explain to a couple of young booksellers in the office. I was like, Listen, this was during the days of paper plane tickets. You did not have an app on your like, we didn’t have cell phones. Mapquest was not reliable. I just remember the one complaint you you didn’t give me enough time to drive from Oxford to Jackson. And I was talking to a friend about this last night. She’s a publicist at a different house and she was like, oh, remember when we had to like, guess whether or not there was going to be traffic or construction or anything like we were doing everything blind, and you were like, my hair was crazy.

That Oxford thing— the people in Oxford, as you know, are just wonderful people and Larry Brown was there, came to my thing. And it was about the fourth thing I’d ever done the fourth bookstore event I’d ever done. So I was out late with Larry. And then they the people from the bookstore told me, Oh, Jackson’s just, you know, whatever. It was three-hour drive. I had a live TV show schedule, and you got the video of it sent to you. And your first comment was, what the hell are you doing with your hair?

You know, this is what happens when you let a baby publicist drive. I mean, when I think back, though, on what happened with Cold Mountain, I mean, National Book Award, now it was made into a movie in what ‘03 then it was made into an opera in 2015. And I’m like, how do you make an opera out of Cold Mountain when Inman doesn’t really talk a lot.

He sings some.

I mean, I would hope so, I don’t know enough about opera. But when you think about it, too, and going back, and just what we could do and how you publish books, and how much that has changed. You know, we live in a very different world now. And you don’t really quite have to go on the road for months and months. We sent you on an odyssey, Chuck, we sent you on an odyssey. And, you know, obviously, it ties in well, with the book. I mean, you did eventually get home, you met a lot of characters on the road, and nothing bad happens. You have some stories, but nothing bad ultimately happened. But you know, Thirtheen Moons has that connection to the Aeneid, as well. And now there’s a connection to Sophocles in your noir, in The Trackers. And I just want to get back to that for a second because I was not expecting that. And I mean, I appreciate The Odyssey, I really do. I appreciate Cold Mountain. And I promise we’ll come back to more Cold Mountain stories, because it’s just so funny to think about the fact that one, this book is still out in the world, but more importantly, you’re still willing to go back on the road. Sophocles, for a second and the Greeks. And how you pulled from this.

This was during that period I was talking about when I’m self-indulgent. So, I was I was thinking about the Greeks and Greek drama in particular, but also just the general Greek mythology and stories, and Long really got his origin in Apollo, who had all those great nicknames, and one of them was long shooter, because he was a great you know, archery guy. And so, the name Long comes from Apollo and, and then, you know, when Hermes stole Apollo’s cattle, and he crawled out of his cradle to go steal cattle, there’s a fragment of Sophocles’ play, that can be translated to The Trackers and he sends a bunch of Senators out to track down his cattle and it’s just it’s a comedy in their bumbling around and all that and I wanted Val to be to be that kind of a searcher, of a tracker.

Val is such a good stand in for the reader, I should say to be specific, he really there’s some stuff that he gets out to San Francisco and the Bay Area and there’s some stuff that happens and he is wholly surprised, Val is just constantly surprised in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen in one of your narrators before I mean, certainly not Inman and Ada, and there are no real surprises for them, and certainly not Luce in Nightwoods and Varina herself and Will in Thirteen Moons, they’re all sort of very, they’re not as light as Val. Val is kind of like, okay, you’re gonna have to pardon the pun, he’s a whole new frontier for you as a writer, sorry, I couldn’t resist it was, It’s so terrible. But can we talk about the evolution of you and your style? I mean, I know you like to rewrite said I remember the rewriting, I know you’d like to rewrite. You were really good. And you did a tour journal that was published on salon.com. Back in the day, and yeah, and I remember talking to your editor at Salon at the time, and she was like, he just turns in the cleanest prose. I’m like, I know, dude can’t turn in messy sentence. I don’t know about manuscripts overall. But like, you don’t do messy sentences, and especially when it’s like a tiny, quick thing. And I think it’s not on the site anymore. But let’s just talk about that piece of it for a second, because you are very precise. And you’ve always had these characters that are very sort of self-contained. They’re all a little older than Val too and I don’t know if that’s part of it. Although I guess Ada might be roughly the same age, but obviously different time periods. But I want to talk about the evolution of you as a stylist.

Yeah. Language is the thing that I enjoy the most. I’ve tried to write faster than I do. And it just doesn’t work, because if the language isn’t, isn’t in the ballpark of where I want it to be, I can’t go forward. So writing, first people asked me, How many drafts did this go through? Well, it doesn’t really go through drafts. So you know, I work forward as much as I can, but I’m also jumping around a lot. But if the language isn’t right, then I can’t go forward, I have to keep tinkering with it, I have to go away from it for a while and do something else. But it’s the language that’s, that’s driving me.

The Trackers is a little more cinematic than earlier. But I mean, the dialogue just snaps like I mean, the dialogue just goes it’s amazing. And it’s a little sort of not quite Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, It Happened One Night, but there’s a little bit of a rhythm and a riffing to it that is not necessarily present in other books. And I’m not entirely sold on the fact that it’s because it’s set in the Great Depression, I keep coming back to the fact that I think you’ve really evolved as a writer, and it’s just cuz you’re so loose on the page with this book, it’s wild to see.

I don’t know, I can’t say that it came about any faster or less tedious. But I think it’s just the characters. I mean, I wanted Eve to be that, that kind of snappy, sharp, doesn’t respect anybody too much. And that’s mostly rose out of that set of that set of characters. Val sometimes kind of a little bit soaks up some of Eve’s energy, especially when they’re in California, and Pharaoh is, you know, sort of a fairly, you know, he’s to the point. So, I mean, I do want to write shorter books, I want to read shorter books, I really want to write something that’s 150 pages long.

That’s gonna be a fun challenge.

I feel like I’ve read nothing, but Patrick Modiano the past. And, and I just, I just read those. And I think I’ll look at look at what he can do in 200 pages or 185 pages.

I think you could get there. I absolutely think you could get there. I mean, one of the things I do also love about this book, though, is not just the rhythm of the sentences and the dialogue and the momentum of the story, but it ends in exactly the way it’s supposed to end. And obviously, we’re not going to tell people how it ends. But I want to talk about the construction of the ending because you don’t plan. You know, I mean, you don’t plan so we had to get here somehow. How’d you do it?

Well, you know, there’s those writers who say, oh, I don’t start till I know the last page. Well, that’s not me. I knew what I didn’t want. And I think the challenge was to find a satisfying way, once you rule out a number of things that might be expectations in in a story of this sort. You rule those things out, then how do you get to an ending that may be satisfying or at least somewhat satisfying,

Okay, is this the first ending you landed on?

CF
No.

Okay. Yeah, I had a sneaking suspicion here. We’re gonna say, have you ever just taken the first thing that it’s appeared on the page?

Probably not. I’m so envious of writers like Kerouac.

That might have been the drugs, Chuck. I mean, in all fairness, the man did a lot of speed. I mean, I wasn’t there. I’ve been in books a long time. I was not actually there when Kerouac… But my understanding is dude did a lot of speed. So you know, we got some cool books out of it and then we got some stuff where it’s like, hey, look…

I love revision. I mean, revision is where I find the book I’m writing. I don’t find it in that first pass. That’s just the way it works for me. And I would, I would much rather be the writing all this crazy stuff and then it’s great.

Yeah, I’m okay with you taking your time. Just take your time. I do. I think, you know, sometimes there’s this really unfair pressure on writers to either stick to whatever came before that was the thing. You know, I sort of feel like sometimes writers in the UK have an easier time just saying, well, this is the book I’m going to write, and you can deal with it as you will. And I think sometimes there’s an expectation here, and I just, I really want to get lost in a book. I just, I want someone to tell me something I don’t know or just take me somewhere or teach me something or break my heart or break my brain sometimes that happens in the same sentence. But you know, when I look at your novels as a body of work, for me, the sort of obsessions are there like, it’s sort of clear what you like to noodle with, regardless of the time period, regardless of you know, the details of the story. I sort of know what I’m getting with you. But I’m wondering to Varina, there was one point where you felt like Varina herself is a little too Western and a little too crude. And Eve is so not that despite Eve’s story, she’s a great character, but you had to tweak Varina because your wife was just like, dude, no, this does not work. This is too much. So how much of that do you take book to book? Like, here’s the thing I learned about character and I think I’m just going to carry it forward, because I feel like, you know, Eve could have been really rough around the edges. And she is not. She knows exactly who she is. She’s a great, great character.

Once I realized, for me, the core of understanding Eve was when I realized she liked High School. She liked Latin class she liked, you know, the kinds of things that were in high school back then. And that that was taken away from her by the Depression, and that that shape that shaped her, her character for me from that point forward.

It’s a really great detail. It’s a really, really great detail, and it’s so revealing, because, again, you know, she’s been riding the rails, and she’s got this backstory that is slightly complicated, and, well, a little messy. What else were you reading while you were playing with what became The Trackers? I mean, there’s, I’m not kidding when I say you’ve written into our set in the Great Depression. I mean, did you go back to the greats? Did you go back to sort of the Marlowes?

Yeah, but I read those a lot. I mean, even in graduate school, I wrote a lot of papers about Chandler and Hammett. Well, this one may actually have been useful in this. I wrote this paper about amateur detectives in Victorian novels. Yeah, they’re an amateur detective as the book goes along.

It all comes together, it all comes back to school, and reading and all of the stuff that you know, you sort of layer it on as you go, right? Like all of the books that we read, become part of whatever we do. I mean, I was a history major in college, I was not an English major. So I’ve actually I keep attempting to read Middlemarch and I keep failing. I even bought a new copy, because it’s prettier than the one I owned. I was like, that’s just too ugly. I’m never going to read it. So I bought a new one with, you know, French flaps. And no, no, yeah.

I’m that way with Proust. I keep trying.

I have a really, really good translation of the first volume. And it’s terrific and I still haven’t finished it. Because I mean, part of it is too, there’s so much out there in the world that I would love to read on top of what I’m doing, but I produce quite a lot of original audio in a single week. And I don’t always get to revisit stuff, but can we you know, I remember years ago, I may have gotten this off of your author questionnaire and it’s been a minute since I read that, but I remember us and comics were part of what drove you to story and drove you to being a writer. And you know, like many other kids, you started writing books when you were little kind of thing. Yeah. But can we talk about some of the writers who have been a big influence on you just as a reader and just as you know, sort of a guy who likes to write, and not just the author.

I mean, in in high school, I had this friend who was a football player, and he was a year or two older, he said, you don’t you don’t read good enough books. You read a lot of junk. I wasn’t differentiating, I was just reading. And he said, Read Ethan Frome, read The Old Man and the Sea. And that sort of that was, that was a real nudge in the direction. In college, I used to spend a huge amount of time in the library, reading stuff that I wasn’t assigned to read. I read a lot of Russians; Turgenev was an especial favorite. But for whatever reason, that’s, that’s if I had spot of spare time, or if I just made spare time and didn’t do something I was supposed to do. That’s what I would be big sitting in the library reading was something some of those 19th century Russians.

Yeah, if you have a chance, there’s a new translation of Fathers and Children, New York Review of Books Classics, and it’s pretty great.

I’ll have I’ll have to get that.

I don’t read Russian, so I don’t know. But I mean, in terms of a reading experience literature in translation, it’s pretty great.

About two thirds of the books I’ve bought in the past five years have been from that series, right? From New York. Review of Books Classics.

Yeah, so so good. And there are times where you know, you have to go and weed the shelves at home every now and again. And they never get off the shelves, they never, they never make it to the donate. Ever, ever. Do you miss the world of The Trackers? Do you miss that sort of getting lost in the research and the characters in the story and just stepping out of the 21st century?

Yeah, I mean, when I’m doing it, I’m reading the books from that period, I’m listening to the music from that period, watching the movies, and some so much of that, given how awful the times were, so much of that, especially music and movies had so much life and, and energy and optimism in it. I mean, that’s one of the things that I wanted to keep in mind in writing this book is that I remember, in my family, my grandparents were very progressive kind of people, when they talked about the Depression they mostly talked about education and hope and you know, you, you keep on working towards these things that would be good for everybody— and they’ll happen. So I wanted to keep a sense of that in the book.

I mean, that’s something you’ve always been really clear about, regardless of which book you’re describing. I mean, talking about historical fiction is that conversation between past and present. And I mean, that’s the thing that I appreciate the most reading historical fiction is how do I figure out what I can take out of it and bring it into, you know, my life with my multiple cell phones and multiple laptops and very hard-wired life. You know, I spend a lot of time on planes, you know, things like that, where, you know, everything seems slower at first for Val and Eve, and Long. But the stakes ratchet up and everything starts to move faster. The pacing of The Trackers is pretty spectacular, as the stakes go, and it gets, you know, and you’re cranking it up a little bit. And I’m just like, I don’t want this to end. And yet, I don’t want this to end. And yet.

A little bit of work went into that.

Yeah, I can imagine. I’ve read enough books to know that when it goes that seamlessly now that doesn’t just pop out of the pen. That’s I’m not going to ask how many rewrites it took because I can see you just chipping away until you got the thing. And again, you know, for listeners, when you get to the end of The Trackers, you are going to be so deeply satisfied, because that ends the only way it could. And when I say that I mean it is true to these characters. It’s true to the story. It’s true the period it’s true, to sort of the energy on the page, right? Have you found the next thing because frequently you find whatever the nut of the next book is while you’re working on the one that’s hitting the world. So do you know?

I’ve got a little bit of writing on a couple of different things that I’m not committed to yet. I can’t quite decide, but I’ve got, you know, 2000 pages here. 4000 pages there.

You have?

Words, I mean words.

I was about to say, Wait, Chuck? Oh, no, you can’t write 4000 pages and not be committed. Okay, words. Okay, that I understand that is that is an entirely different exercise. When do you know? Like, when do you know the thing actually has life? And it’s the right. I mean, it can’t just be the language, right?

I have to get committed to the characters and the time. It usually takes about 30 pages before I think, Okay, this, this might work, this might work.

And then you sort of stare at it for a little bit. Yeah, you go for a walk. What do you love most about The Trackers?

That’s a hard question. Because when I get to the end of a book, I’m mostly just seeing potential problems. Did I work enough on this, did I work enough on that? And I remember, with Cold Mountain, somebody finally said, hey, we should just send somebody down in North Carolina to get it, because you’re at the point where you’re not making it better, you’re just making it different. So, I’ve tried to use that ever since and try to recognize that point when you’re not making it better. But I like to revise, I like to tinker. And so it takes a while before I am not thinking just about oh, did I get that right?

Yeah, I remember hearing a story that maybe the manuscript for Thirteen Moons, it was probably the closest you’d come to hitting a deadline.

It would have been to the day, it was specified on the contract.

I mean, obviously, when you’re publishing a book, you want it to be big, you want it to get all of the things. And what, we sold a million copies in the first like 20 minutes. I mean, it was it was a wild wild ride. And you just said yes to everything. It was great.

And I remember asking Morgan, before the book was published, how many copies do we need to sell for you to be happy? And by that I meant for you to publish another book. And he said, 25,000 and then he paused, and he said, well 20. I mean, it was just crazy. The most surreal moment was going into New York in November and the book came out in May, I think, got in New York, with a book nominated for the National Book Award, number one on the New York Times bestseller list that was just like, this isn’t real, they would put me in an institution if I’d dreamed of that a year ago.

I had to look it up. It was 61 weeks. And I was like, really? I mean, I was laughing about this with your kid yesterday over email, one, your adult child, which I don’t even know what to do with that. But, you know, I used to have those crazy paper calendars for you with post it notes and different colored Sharpies, and I still run my life with post it notes. And when she said, Well, I think I picked up my love of post it notes from those crazy calendars. I’m delighted, I have turned someone on to the joy of post it notes.

You gave me those. I still have those, a million post it notes, a year and a half or more of calendar pages.

I mean, who needs an app when you have post it notes. Chuck, we ran your life for 18 months off of post it notes. And you let us do it. Really you just kept saying okay. We were fedex-ing plane tickets to weird places…

Oh, the thing was, it just felt like it didn’t feel real, but it felt like this is a moment that I that I’m connecting with readers I’m going to these bookstores I’m shaking hands with, and you know, not just readers but with the bookstore owners. And this this bit of a tour I’m going to do is some of those people that you’ve scheduled back then Yeah, million years ago, I’m going down to Mississippi, hitting all those stores that have been so good to me for 26 years.

But now you don’t have to tour for 18 months straight. We can do it a little differently now. Sure. It’s great to see you in person too. But it’s also nice that we can do this over zoom, and it makes accessibility less of an issue for you know other people and it’s great and I just I’m so pleased we got to hang out even if it is just virtually but yeah, it’s this book how… it seems like we just did this yesterday. And yet I know intellectually, we did not just do this yesterday, five books, four books later, right, your fifth novel The Trackers is out. And I’m just hoping listeners have as much fun reading it as I did, because really it is this book is a blast. It’s an absolute blast. And you’re doing lots of big things with American history and the mythology of the West and all this but it’s also just really fun. It’s really really fun, this book.

45:28

That’s the target I was aiming at.

I think it’s pretty cool. Anyway, Charles Frazier, I, you know, I know what’s your byline and I’m gonna say it again. Charles Frazier, author of The Trackers. We’re so happy to see you. But honestly, Chuck, this was a delight, so nice to hang out with you.

This was so much fun. So much fun.