Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Book

Though this book was the last of the Leatherstocking Tales series (which follows the life of backwoods hunter and scout Natty Bumpo --"Leatherstocking" and "Deerslayer" are two of the several nicknames he'll bear during his career) to be written, it's actually the first in the internal chronology of the series, set in 1744 at the outbreak of King George's War. (This was one of several English vs. French wars in North America, leading up to the French and Indian War depicted in The Last of the Mohicans. Neither the date or the name of the war are explicitly given in the book, but enough clues are supplied to make them clear.) Having read two books of the series out of order, as a grade-school and junior-college student, I'd resolved, after this long hiatus, to finally read the whole corpus, in as close to the internal order as I could. Now that I've finished this one, my only regret is that I waited so long; it's the best of Cooper's works that I've read yet. The cover copy of this 1982 Bantam classic printing (not the same edition Goodreads depicts above) characterizes this as Cooper's masterpiece. Since I've only read three of his other novels, I can't say for certain if that's true; but I think it well may be.

We first meet the roughly 22-year-old Natty here about to arrive at Lake Otsego, in the New York Appalachian mountains just about due west of Albany (the later site of the real-life settlement of Cooperstown, where the author grew up). An orphan raised by the Delaware Indians (how that came about isn't explained in this book), he's on his way to meet his Indian friend Chingachgook on an at first undisclosed errand, and traveling in company with slightly-older trapper Henry "Hurry Harry" March, just because they're bound for the same place. March is interested in visiting the lake's residents: widowed, mysterious (and maybe shady) "Floating Tom" Hutter, who's built a residence/fortress on a shoal well out into the lake, and his two comely daughters, Judith and "feeble-minded" Hetty. It's a situation already fraught with danger and suspense, because the recent outbreak of war makes isolated settlers like these probable targets for bands of the Indian allies of the French. The main events of the story (except for a sort of epilogue --which Cooper handles here much better than he does in The Spy) take place in less than the span of a week; but an enormous amount of adventure and moral trial and growth happens in that span.

All of the author's works I'd read previously were early ones; this is a much more mature work, and it shows. Cooper's diction here isn't any more elaborate and orotund than that of most Romantic-era fiction (and that's also the case with The Spy; I'm beginning to think the fulsomeness of The Last of the Mohicans is more unique to that work than a general defect of Cooper's style). His approach to story telling, to be sure, is slow and deliberate; he uses big words if they serve his purpose, constructs complex sentences, and isn't afraid of occasional direct address to the reader. But those features don't bother me; and the story he tells is absorbing (even suspenseful and tense), well-constructed, and emotionally powerful; this is Romantic historical fiction at its finest. Moreover, it's the vehicle for profound moral and spiritual reflection, which is built into the fabric of the story and animates it as naturally as blood and breath animate the human body. That aspect is more pronounced here than in any other Cooper novel I've read, and that's what elevates it into five-star territory.

Both Balzac and James Russell Lowell (in the latter's satirical poem "Cooper," one of several literary criticisms he wrote in poetic form of other authors of his day) fault Cooper as not being particularly sharp in his characterizations. (Although despite that, Balzac rated him highly overall.) Lowell was particularly caustic about Cooper's female characters, deeming them all "sappy" and "flat," and essentially indistiguishable. But by now, I've read enough of Cooper to judge this for myself, and to a degree rebut it --and no Cooper novel furnishes as much grist for a rebuttal as this one, because ALL of the important characters here are sharply-drawn and distinguished, and come alive with considerable reality. We get more of a sense of Natty's inner character here than we do in either of the first two books of the series to be written, and I'd say that's true of Chingachgook as well. Judith Hutter is anything but "sappy" or "flat," and Hetty is sui generis. (Some of Cooper's women deserve Lowell's stricture --Alice in The Last of the Mohicans comes to mind; but that's mainly because she's overshadowed by Cora, who's another exception to the charge; and Frances Wharton in The Spy is yet another. And there's no Cooper novel I've read that's without some distinctively drawn and memorable male characters, as well. )

In my review of the Last of the Mohicans, I mentioned (and refuted) Mark Twain's snide criticism of that work in "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," but noted that he reserved most of his artillery for The Deerslayer. His principal criticism is for the scene where Hutter's "Ark," or oar-and-sail propelled barge, passes a point where Indians are waiting in a tree to ambush it, and successfully gets by before any of them can effect a permanent landing on the boat, most of them falling into the water. With a great show of supposed plausibility, he purports to show mathematically that it's impossible for a craft to go that rapidly, and ridiculous to suppose that it could. (When I read Twain's collected essays as a teen, I noted that in controversies, intellectually dishonest ridicule is a tactic he generally preferred over reasoned argumentation, which is why his essays have never commanded the same respect as those of some other writers of his era; and this case is no exception.) Suffice it to say that his argument depends on his "guess" about the dimensions of the vessel and its possible speed, and that when the actual passage is read and compared to Twain's description of it, it's Twain who looks ridiculous. His (hyperbolic) claim that Cooper overuses the device, in this series, of persons disclosing their whereabouts in the forest by stepping on a twig also falls flat here; some characters avoid doing so, and a deer does it (I've actually personally heard a deer doing that in the Appalachian forest, which I doubt Twain ever did --the woods around Hannibal, MO in the 1830s were a lot less "wild" than the real wilderness), but no human ever does it.

My one criticism of Cooper's performance here is on a major point of historical accuracy (or, in his case, inaccuracy); he confuses the Iroquois and the Hurons as the same tribe, allied with the French, whereas in fact they were two different tribal groups, mortal enemies of each other, and the former were actually allied with the British. For a New York native who wrote a great deal about Indians (and the Iroquois were and are THE major Indian group in the state!) and purported to know something about them, that's a pretty glaring error. However, his portrayal of the Indians here is otherwise accurate, and not an unsympathetic depiction of their attitudes and culture (warts and all). Criticisms of Cooper's portrayal as racist, IMO, are unfounded. Natty has, to be sure, some excessive consciousness of his white identity (partly a psychological reaction to growing up as a minority of one in another culture --and as Cooper makes clear in the Preface, Natty's prejudices aren't necessarily his own prejudices); but he respects Indian culture and beliefs and recognizes Indians as fellow humans of no less worth than his own, in sharp contradistinction to the racist attitudes of March and Hutter. Personally, I found that one of the best features of the book.

I definitely intend to read more by this writer; and he's earned a place in my Favorite Writers list!