Readers of popular fiction have been wondering what Charles Frazier has been up to since the surprising success of his first novel, "Cold Mountain," in 1997.

	Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger version. "THIRTEEN MOONS" By Charles Frazier Random House ($26.95)

Reading American history and spending a lot of time in the woods, obviously.

What emerged is "Thirteen Moons," his second novel, pointedly different from the first, yet with echoes that repeat like a yell in the Great Smoky Mountains, site of much of this book.

For starters, Frazier structures the narrative in the first person, not the third-person observations of "Cold Mountain."

The narrator is Will Cooper, who begins his tale as an old man awaiting his ticket to "the Nightland." As the elderly are prone to do, he loves to reminisce.

A faint voice at the end of the telephone line prompts him to travel into the past when he was a 12-year-old orphan sent alone into the Cherokee lands of southwestern North Carolina to manage a trading post.

It's the first of Will's many journeys through the forests and the cities of 19th-century America, the classic road-novel format that Frazier followed in "Cold Mountain" and continues here with more variety and depth.

His backdrop is the history of the Cherokee people who achieved an independent "nation" in the new United States following the Revolution and then would have it stripped from them in the 1830s.

A daily diarist, Cooper chronicles the fate of these people, both as a white man and as the adopted son of a powerful tribal leader.

"I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form," Will wonders. "Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless."

A curious statement from a novelist, almost a disclaimer, asking us not to expect much from a mere book, yet the first half of this novel is anything but "flat and still and harmless."

It's a piece of sustained skill and lyricism as Frazier conjures a kind of spell over the reader with his account of life in this short-lived Eden in the forests and villages of the Cherokee. History told in the words of a talented and sensitive novelist such as Frazier does seem alive and vital.

We know what's coming, of course, the "Trail of Tears." In the voice of Will, we learn how Cherokee society was splintered by the forced evacuation ordered by the federal government and enforced by the U.S. Army in the 1830s. Thousands of Cherokee died in what were the forerunners of concentration camps before they were resettled in Oklahoma.

Frazier handles the telling with restraint and poignancy, capturing the tragedy in a single incident in which some Cherokee are forced to hunt down their own in order to save their skins.

Will's story is based loosely on the life of William Holland Thomas, a white adopted by the tribe who protected a small band of Cherokee on his North Carolina land. By adulthood, Will has become the owner of vast mountain tracts, a skilled attorney and a state politician who harbors and preserves a tiny fraction of the scattered tribe.

Frazier seems to have enjoyed sending his hero to a swampy Washington, D.C., to plead the Cherokee case and meet the great figures of the day, including Davy Crockett, a U.S. representative from Tennessee, and his political foe, President Andrew Jackson, architect of the Cherokee removal.

"When I knew him [Crockett] he was a figure of folklore; it took the Alamo to elevate him all the way to myth," Will observes.

While he enjoys the favors of Washington lovelies, Will has his enduring love, Claire. They become passionate lovers as teens, but are separated in complicated and bitter fashion.

It's here when Frazier's momentum flags. He dispenses with slavery and the Civil War in short order, giving over only two paragraphs to Will's slave-owning history and writing a desultory account of his hero's military service.

Will becomes an aimless wanderer, finding the widowed Claire again by accident, then losing her and his wealth because of carelessness.

Unlike Inman, who was driven by love to return home in a kind of American "Odyssey," Will, the orphan, decides he has no home to return to. His love has vanished, his Cherokee "family" has died out, and his North Carolina property has been lost.

"Everyone and everything you love goes away," Will says in old age. "You're left with nothing but your moods and memory. Pitiful and powerful tools."

And that is that.

Will's (and Frazier's) love for his Cherokee family and the Eden of the Smoky Mountains created the power and beauty of "Thirteen Moons" early chapters. Their loss, however, left the novelist and his hero empty and a promising novel adrift.