Frazier allows ‘Varina’ to rise again
Charles Frazier’s lively new novel
Varina (Ecco, 353 pp., eeeE) arrives at an improbable if interesting moment. Frazier resurrects and reimagines an obscure historical figure — the wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis — at a time when statues of Confederate “heroes” are being toppled, with Jeff Davis’ among them.
So ably does Frazier bring indomitable Varina Howell Davis to life that I couldn’t help but imagine her reaction if she’d been around to see her husband’s bronze likeness ignominiously hauled away. She’d consider it justice, probably. This is a Southern woman who after the Civil War moved to New York to write for newspapers and declared that “the right side won.”
Frazier’s novel is the latest to star a female figure rescued from history’s dustbin. And Frazier is a superb prose stylist who elevates the historical fiction genre; his 1997 debut, Cold Mountain, won the National Book Award.
Sometimes Frazier’s considerable literary talents get in his way. His writing can be breathtaking, but Varina’s fragmented narrative hopscotches all over the place. Which is a shame, because this picaresque novel’s most memorable scenes rival Gone With the Wind for sheer jawdropping Dixie drama.
As Varina begins, it’s 1906 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and the elderly Varina (called “V”) has a visitor, a black man named James Blake, a schoolteacher. James believes he was once “Jimmie Limber,” the little (real-life) boy rescued and briefly raised by Varina, after she saw him being beaten in the street. The last time they were together it was 1865.
So V begins filling in the blanks for James, telling the story of her life. V has a Scarlett O’Hara ferocity she tempers with occasional opiates. She’s a smart, well-read 17year-old girl when she’s shipped off to meet Jeff Davis. Slavery flows like a deep current through Varina.
“From earliest memory, owning other people was a given. But (V) began feeling the strangeness of it about nine or ten — not the wrongness or the sin of it, but the strangeness only.”
In 2018, such paragraphs can land uneasily. Varina the character is a fictional triumph. The book is more problematic. The Civil War continues to haunt.