June Book Report: Varina

It’s no secret that I love the South despite its multiple shortcomings.  Truth be told, I think our nation has multiple shortcomings and as I love it anyway, it doesn’t bother me to have affection for the South and for Southerners.  I love the landscape of the region, the way the warm humid air settles over the day, the way that the magnolias bloom slowly into flowers so fragrant and majestic they seem unreal.   The South is where I first saw lightening bugs and to this day they are utterly magical to me, twinkling against the dark green of my Yankee backyard in the twilight.  I know that I love them so much because they remind me of Tennessee.

Novels of the South are another reason I love the region so much.  I always enjoy a story with a strong sense of place and Southern writers bring that sensibility to their writing, as if the geography is another character in the story.  Among the very best at that is Charles Frazier, who writes about the South at the turning point of the Civil War with an honesty and fondness that is powerful; neither sentiment tempered by the other and both honest.  He turns a beautiful sentence when writing about the foolishness of the human condition; he understands the war as well as the very best historians and he writes about the South in the same way I feel: honest about its weaknesses and fond of the region nonetheless.  I loved his novel Cold Mountain for that honesty and found the same sensibility alive and well in Frazier’s book Varina.

The novel is the story of Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Jefferson Davis, told from Varina’s point of view.  The book begins in 1906, when Varina, now a widow spending summer at a hotel in Saratoga, New York, has a seemingly chance meeting with a black man named James, whom she knew as Jimmie, a child who lived with her during the Civil War.  James has come in search of Varina in order to reconstruct the story of his own life and Varina tells him what she knows.  As a friendship between the two develops, he asks about her life and from there the novel unfolds, weaving together details of Varina’s life as a girl, as a young wife in Washington D.C., and then in Richmond during the Civil War and after, as her own family fled the Confederate capital as the war ended.  Separated from her husband and struggling to rebuild a life in the aftermath of a war that Varina opposed and now in the 20th century has leisure to regret, she tells the story of her long and varied life to James, who listens carefully and asks probing questions.

Frazier can turn a phrase better than most and the talent is on full-display in Varina.  Each word seems carefully chosen and woven together the story is the brilliant tale of a woman who sat up close to history and saw the horror of slavery compounded by pride and war.  From Frazier’s vantage, Varina herself is fascinating, if imperfect.  From the reader’s point of view, it’s a story well worth reading.