SOURCE: "American Odyssey," in The New York Times Book Review, July 13, 1997, p. 14.

[In the following review, Polk considers numerous secondary elements of Cold Mountain, but notes that "however strongly the side issues resonate, they are never allowed to interfere with the main thrust of the plot. The author's focus is always on Ada and Inman."]

For a first novelist, in fact for any novelist, Charles Frazier has taken on a daunting task—and has done extraordinarily well by it. In prose filled with grace notes and trenchant asides, he has reset much of the Odyssey in 19th-century America, near the end of the Civil War.

Although too much can be made of the Homeric parallels, they are obvious, and they echo through the narrative. The author's Ithaca lies deep within the Carolina mountains and is the elusive goal of his Odysseus: a wounded Confederate veteran named Inman who...