Varina

Given Frazier’s background as a professor of English, perhaps it’s not surprising that other literary references abound — sometimes, a bit self-consciously. Sappho and Candide make an appearance, along with the waters of Lethe and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Improbably, while fleeing Yankee wrath after the fall of the South, Varina even fingers a copy of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Frazier invites us to consider the degree to which Varina, like Austen’s heroines, is living in an age when most of her choices are made for her. As the daughter of a dissolute father with a vanished fortune, the teenage Varina accepts marriage to the much older widower Jefferson Davis — a matter of expedience rather than true love. She finds herself at the center of the most profound moral conflict of her time as her politically ambitious husband becomes president of the Confederacy.
The novel opens in 1906, as Varina recalls the war and its aftermath with James, a now-grown black man that she had informally adopted in the antebellum days and raised with her own children. It’s an unconventional relationship, to say the least, and one of two complicated connections across the racial divide explored in the narrative. The other concerns a seemingly fraternal bond between Jefferson Davis and his longtime slave Pemberton. Despite the ostensibly collegial relationship shared by the two men, Varina acknowledges that its underlying rationale was rooted in the threat of the whipping post, and that “the shadow of that post traced divisions clear and precise as the sweeping shadow of a sundial.”
Evocative imagery abounds in Varina, extending Frazier’s reputation for lushly descriptive prose. In a passage about Varina’s reduced circumstances after the war, he details her modest household of exile in London:
The short stack of china stood only five dinner plates tall, each one chipped at the edges and crazed on the pink floral faces. Three soup bowls, five teacups, but only two saucers. Glassware — just four stems — cloudy as an old man’s eye. Bed and table linens and towels worn by time to an indeterminate color, like a teaspoon of coal dust in a pint of heavy cream — the color of dirty soles and also the color of the plaster walls. The tiny fireplace might have been adequate for roasting a single sparrow over a fistful of twigs.
Frazier’s flair for metaphor sometimes lapses into the florid, registering one or two beats too many, as when he observes that an anxious young Varina is “as jangled and chaotic as a handful of steel ballbearings thrown onto the skin of a tympani in the middle of a performance.”
Varina regulates her nerves with small but frequent doses of opium, her drug dependency one of several obvious parallels with  today’s headlines. Frazier also revisits the postwar, Gilded Age obsession with personal health, a reminder that in the matter of American domestic concerns, there’s not much new under the sun. More urgently, the novel’s commentary on the consequences of demagoguery is a cautionary tale for our own Twitterpated age. “He did as most politicians do — except more so — corrupt our language and symbols of freedom, pervert our heroes,” James writes of Jefferson Davis. “Because, like so many of them, he held no beloved idea or philosophy as tightly as his money purse.”
Although Varina necessarily deals with America’s national schism over slavery, the depths of depravity that system of oppression put into place rarely come into full focus in Frazier’s story. The institution’s casual cruelties surface here and there, as in some passages from a Richmond newspaper mentioning matter-of-fact accounts of whippings.
But the moral culpability of the characters in Varina rarely informs any specific, compelling insight. Instead, we get bland truisms like “Being on the wrong side of history carries consequences” and “You can mire yourself in the past, but you can’t change a damn thing . . . ”
At one point, Varina touches on the complexities of writing itself — the struggle to make a book “from the weightless tools of words,” with no guarantee of success. It becomes something of a disclaimer for Frazier’s latest novel, which ultimately lacks the weight it portends.