Steve Bailey's Blog : September 2024

After reading The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin (see the review in the left column), I decided to go light on some recently published John Grisham books, first Camino Ghosts, followed by The Boys from Biloxi. I have read Grisham before and am comfortable with his storytelling, recognizing he will include courtroom drama and lessons in lawyering. The only one I read that did not have this ingredient was A Painted House, which became my favorite of the Grisham books I have read. Both recently read books had those elements but were different stories with different legal issues.

Camino Ghosts had a speculative fiction component that I do not remember from previous Grisham stories, but then I have not read them all. Lord knows the man is a prolific writer. Anyway, I enjoy reading and writing speculative fiction so I was at home with the concept that a voodoo priestess put a curse on an island that was home to runaway slaves that killed any white people who set foot on its sand.

A story that evokes an emotion in me at the end always gets kudos for craftsmanship, and that is what happened in the final pages of The Boys from Biloxi. Two errors, unfortunately, marred the novel. First, a character who blew his brains out on a dock on a lake appears alive and incarcerated in the next chapter. Second, people attending a meeting miles away from Biloxi can hear the hammer and saws of repair work down the hall in an office in Biloxi.

I was so confused by this that I checked out a book review online to confirm that the reviewer saw what I did. She did. She also indicated that Grisham did not follow the rule so heavily pounded into beginning writers about “Show, don’t tell.” I have always had issues with that expression. To me, television, video, and movies show. Storytellers tell. I was glad to see that someone as successful in the field of novel writing as John Grisham tells his story.

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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