SOURCE: "Hope Is Where the Hearth Is," in The Observer, July 20, 1997, p. 17.

[In the following excerpt, Patterson asserts that Cold Mountain "presents the terrible, discordant reality of life in a war."]

God, sex, pigs, mountains and cheese feature heavily in [Cold Mountain], offering enough sexual titillation and metaphysical speculation for the most guilt-ridden survivor of a Catholic childhood. The God of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, set in the American Civil War, is the squeaky-clean Protestant model of the pioneers. However, as the story unfolds, with its bewildering array of lives wrecked by the random ravages of war, perceptions of God, like everything else in the American Dream, become more complicated. Wounded on the Confederate side in the battle of Petersburg, Inman decides to desert and return to his sweetheart, Ada, at Cold Mountain. She has been alone on the family farm since the death of her wealthy father...