Charles Frazier

"Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history"--

A Novel

Varina

Jeremy Anderberg

“It is possible to love someone and still want to throw down every remnant of the order they lived by.”

Charles Frazier is best known for his 1997 mega-hit Cold Mountain, which is another historical fiction set in the midst of the Civil War. (See a trend? Pretty soon here I’ll fully embrace my somewhat embarrassing love of historical fiction.) While that book is on my shelf, I happened to snag a free copy of Varina, and started it on a whim the week after Christmas. I was immediately and somewhat surprisingly pulled right in by both Frazier’s incredible prose and the fascinating story itself.

Varina Davis, forever in the history books as the first and only First Lady of the Confederate States of America, was a fascinating character. She married the much older Jefferson Davis as a young woman, gave birth to a number of children (all but one of whom died before her), was captured after the Civil War, and recovered to live and work in New York until her death 1906.

Frazier obviously has a strong grasp of Varina’s life story and he invented a wonderful narrative structure to tell it in a way that provided a walk in her shoes while not letting her off the hook for her sins: “Those were times that required choosing a side—and then, sooner or later, history asks, which side were you on?”

Going back and forth in time from before the war to after the war to the tumultuous, chaotic reality of life during the war, Frazier makes it hard to hate Varina. And maybe that’s his point. As my pastor talked about from the pulpit this last weekend, once you get to know someone’s story, it’s nearly impossible to not feel some sense of sympathy and relation to your own life and experience. What does it mean to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time? Would you be able to easily dismiss the entirety of how you were raised and where you come from? There just aren’t easy answers, even if there are right answers.

I’ll end with this wonderful take from the narrator about Jeff Davis (whom I did not feel any sympathy towards):

“He did as most politicians do—except more so—corrupt our language and symbols of freedom, pervert our heroes. Because, like so many of them, he held no beloved idea or philosophy as tightly as his money purse. Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light declaration about freedom in the other. And then an outlaw sticks a pistol in his face and says give me one or the other. Every time—ten out of ten—he’ll hug the sack and throw away the ideals. Because the sack’s what’s behind the ideals, like the foundation under a building. And that’s how freedom and chains and a whipping post can live alongside each other comfortably.”

Varina was a great story with superb writing. I can’t wait to read more of Frazier’s slim body of work.

Sooner or later, history asks, which side were you on? In his powerful new novel, Charles Frazier returns to the time and place of Cold Mountain, vividly bringing to life the chaos and devastation of the Civil War Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history—culpable regardless of her intentions. The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters, and the country divided, Varina and her children escape Richmond and travel south on their own, now fugitives with “bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit.” Intimate in its detailed observations of one woman’s tragic life and epic in its scope and power, Varina is a novel of an American war and its aftermath. Ultimately, the book is a portrait of a woman who comes to realize that complicity carries consequences.

Varina A Novel

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