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My Reading Note
I have caught myself saying that a writer’s second book is not as good as the first, only to realize that what I meant was simpler: I wanted more of what I experienced with the first book. The three writers in this essay followed strong debuts, and their second books were read against a standard that their first book had set. That standard is difficult to meet, and it is the reason this particular kind of disappointment is worth examining.
Writing the second book is the first time a writer has to contend with the reputation that the previous book has created. The first book sets the standard, and the second book is measured against it.
Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons (2006) sold well, but it was read against his debut, and by that measure it came up short. Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend (2002) appeared after ten years of anticipation, and the wait had raised the measure beyond what the novel could reach, since readers had spent a decade imagining what her follow-up would be. Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore (1951) moved away from the war novel that had made his name, and that radical change contributed to the disappointment.
The phrase “falls short” is doing a lot of work here. It can mean that a book was received without much praise, or that it sold poorly. It can also mean that critics found it wanting in comparison, or that it went somewhere readers did not expect. Or it can mean that the book has simply been remembered less strongly than the first. In each of the three cases that follow, the phrase turns out to describe an expectation rather than a judgment.
Falling Short of the Debut’s Expectations
A second book can fall short of the first for reasons that have nothing to do with what the writer did or intended. The numbers may not match, which is a fact about the market and not about the book. The reviews may be less generous, a matter for the critics rather than the book. The memory of the first may simply outweigh the second, a question of time and not of either book.
The “falling short” this essay examines is different. It happens when a second book is measured against the impression the first book left, and that impression is not reproducible. Frazier, Tartt, and Mailer each published a second book that was read against a first book the readers already loved, and in each case readers had already decided what that second book should be.
Charles Frazier: Continuation of the Same Themes
Cold Mountain (1997) was not a modest debut. It won the National Book Award, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for sixty-one weeks, and sold over three million copies. Frazier, a former literature professor who had quit his job to write fiction, was forty-six when it was published, making him famous in a way few first novelists experience. Nine years later, Thirteen Moons was published. With an advance of $8 million, the novel was one of the most anticipated of the year.
The two books share more than a setting. Both are set in the mountains of western North Carolina, and both are historical fictions about a vanishing world. Each centers on a man separated from the woman he loves, moving through a landscape that is being taken from the people who inhabit it. The prose carries the same reverence for nature and the same elegiac voice, and the plots share a rambling, myth-laden quality that combines long-distance yearning with a picaresque journey.
There is one formal difference: Cold Mountain is told in the third person, alternating among several characters’ perspectives, while Thirteen Moons is told in the first person by Will Cooper, a ninety-year-old man recalling his life. The change in perspective did not change the register—Frazier was writing the same kind of book again, with the same preoccupations and the same prose.
I read both novels within a few months of each other and found that the second one was easier to admire than to enjoy. The prose was still beautiful, but the story kept wandering into research, and I found myself skimming the passages I would have lingered over in Cold Mountain.
The book’s reception reflected that continuity. Thirteen Moons sold more than 100,000 copies in its first month and became a bestseller. However, reviews were mixed, and the comparison to Cold Mountain was inescapable. Some critics praised Frazier’s writing while finding the central love story inferior to the one in the first book. Others were harsher, describing the novel as a work of research that lacked the force of fiction. The book arrived under considerable speculation and some sour responses, given the size of the advance.
Frazier succeeded on his own terms, and that is precisely what made the reception difficult. He wrote a second book that was recognizably his, but readers measured it against what they had liked the first time. By the time Thirteen Moons was announced, the comparison was inevitable, and the novel was read as a lesser version of the book that preceded it.
Donna Tartt: Displacement into Another World
Donna Tartt was twenty-eight when The Secret History (1992) was published, and the novel sold more than a million copies in the United States. It was a murder story told in reverse, narrated by a scholarship student at an elite Vermont college, and it made Tartt a literary celebrity before she had published a second book.
The wait for that second book lasted ten years. During that decade, anticipation grew, and by the time The Little Friend was published, readers had already formed expectations that had very little to do with the book itself. They were not simply waiting for her next novel; she was publishing the next Donna Tartt novel.
I read The Little Friend without knowing anything about the reception it had received. I had not followed the wait, and I did not know how long readers had been anticipating the book or how divided the responses to it had become. I only learned about the controversy afterward, when I went looking for what others had written about it.
However, The Little Friend took a different direction. While The Secret History was set among classics students at a small college in Vermont, narrated in the first person by a participant in the story, The Little Friend is set in a small Mississippi town, told in the third person, and follows a twelve-year-old girl named Harriet as she tries to solve the murder of her brother, which happened when she was a baby. The change is not only in the overall register but also in the setting and perspective. Tartt moved from the academic and insular to the Southern Gothic and communal.
The book’s reception reflected the difficulty of comparison rather than the quality of the book itself. Publishers Weekly praised the novel and described it as confirming Tartt’s storytelling talent. Kirkus, meanwhile, called it ambitious and absorbing but noted its length and structural unevenness. Salon praised its atmosphere and characters but criticized its length, pacing, and murky resolution. The split was consistent: reviewers admired the writing but found the novel longer and looser than The Secret History.
Tartt’s case is not a continuation in the way Frazier’s was. She kept the ambition of the first book but changed the world it occupied. The comparison was still inevitable, but it was a comparison between two different kinds of novels rather than two versions of the same one. Mailer’s second book would take the change further (discussed in the next section), abandoning the mode of the debut altogether.
Norman Mailer: Departure from the Debut
The Naked and the Dead (1948) made Norman Mailer famous at twenty-five. The novel was a critical and commercial success, widely regarded as one of the strongest war novels to come out of the Second World War, and it established him as a major young writer. The debut was not simply well received, however; it set the terms by which everything he published afterward would be measured.
Three years later, Barbary Shore arrived, and it was a different kind of book. Where the debut was a naturalistic war novel, the second book was a political allegory set in a Brooklyn boarding house. The protagonist is a wounded veteran of the Second World War, so the material is not entirely new; what changed is what the novel does with it. The war is his background rather than the subject, and the book that follows is about ideology, paranoia, and a small group of people talking in a rented room. The shift from the Pacific campaign to a rooming house was not a subtle one.
What I find most interesting about Barbary Shore is that the war is still there, just not in the foreground. Lovett’s wound is the reason he is in that rooming house. Mailer did not leave the war behind; he just moved it to the edge of the frame and put something else in the center.
The book’s reception was harsh, with contemporary reviews overwhelmingly negative. Time attacked the novel as a throwback to 1930s “social consciousness” fiction, The New Yorker described it as a “resolutely dismal second offering,” and The New York Times called it an “obscure political allegory.” The novel sold poorly, and the critical consensus treated it as a failure.
What made Barbary Shore a departure was not only its subject but also its mode. Mailer had abandoned the realism of his debut for something closer to allegory and argument, and readers who had admired the first book found little of what they had valued in the second. The change was not a continuation of the same themes in a new setting, as it had been for Frazier, nor a move into a different world while keeping the same ambition, as it had been for Tartt. Mailer had left the territory of his debut altogether.
However, the failure of the second book did not end his career. Mailer published The Deer Park in 1955, and later, with Advertisements for Myself (1959), he began constructing a public persona that would define the second half of his career. The early reception of Barbary Shore marked the first time his reputation had been tested by a book that went somewhere readers did not want to follow.
I find Mailer’s later reinvention more interesting than the second book itself. He did not recover by writing another war novel or by repeating what had worked. He recovered by turning to nonfiction and putting his own persona into the reporting, a move that began with Advertisements for Myself and culminated in The Armies of the Night, published in 1968. The reception of Barbary Shore was part of what made that possible.
Closing
The three cases outlined above form a sequence, though it is less a progression than a set of variations on one situation. Frazier continued the same themes in a second book that was recognizably his, while Tartt kept the ambition of the first book but moved to a different world; Mailer, however, abandoned the mode of his debut altogether. The distance between the first book and the second differs in each case, and so does the reader’s willingness to accept the change.
What the three cases reveal is that the second book answers to terms set before it. Those terms were set by the impression the debut made on its readers, and no writer can control the impression a book makes. But there is a harder point underneath. When a reader says a second book falls short, the judgment is rarely about the second book. It is about the debut and the standard the reader has carried over from it. The second book is judged by a measure the first book established.
While this essay presents three writers whose second books were read against a successful debut, the next one turns to three writers whose debuts made little impression at all. Their second books appeared without a public expectation attached, and this is not to say the writing came easily. Salman Rushdie, Jack Kerouac, and Malcolm Lowry each wrote a second book that changed the course of their career, and none of them had a first book that set a standard to meet.
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
Two older posts on the site complement this essay. The review of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain examines the prose and structure that Thirteen Moons would later be measured against. The review of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend gives the novel the attention that the reception around it often overshadowed. Both posts supply the book-level reading that this essay can only point toward.
Further Reading
- Excerpt: ‘Thirteen Moons’ on NPR
- Why you should study the classics but not kill anyone: Lessons from Donna Tartt’s fiction by James T. Keane, www.americamagazine.org
- Talk with Norman Mailer by Harvey Breit, The New York Times archives
