Reviewed by Jon Clinch

Robert Hicks' fact-based THE WIDOW OF THE SOUTH is a dense and deeply informed hymn to the power of fidelity, shaped by the life of a woman who showed her young nation how to keep faith with its wartime dead.

When we first meet the widow herself, Carrie McGavock, she is a young mother sadly adrift in her Franklin, Tennessee plantation house. A mourner from the outset and a mourner perhaps by nature, dressed in black from head to toe, she stalks the great house tormented by grief for her three dead children -- and too emotionally crippled to care properly for the two who remain (or for her often-absent husband, John). McGavock's isolated world is soon rocked by the nearby Battle of Franklin, one of the most brutal episodes of the Civil War, a five-hour melee in which nine thousand soldiers died. The Confederates requisition her house as a field hospital, and as McGavock witnesses the suffering and strength of others her own closeted life begins tentatively to open.

Hicks is at his very best describing scenes of battle, which he does from the viewpoints of a half-dozen characters. Michael Shaara told his fine THE KILLER ANGELS in a similar and similarly memorable way -- reporting events at Gettysburg as witnessed by Lee, Longstreet, Armistead and more -- but Hicks chooses his narrators from much farther down the military ladder. Their observations ring true in a variety of voices, those of soldiers and bystanders alike, a feat for which Hicks deserves much credit. (Should you doubt that he gets his history right, consider that the hard-nosed enthusiasts over at CivilWarInteractive.com, "The Daily Newspaper of the Civil War," have given WIDOW their ringing endorsement.)

Among the narrators is the fictional Zachariah Cashwell of the 24th Arkansas, whom we come to know both during the battle and as he recovers under Carrie McGavock's hand. Prior to the fight he causes himself to come to terms with his own mortality; later on, having been spared, he finds himself strangely ill at ease. McGavock's dilemma follows a similar course, beginning with an accommodation to the death of her children and ending with a reluctant understanding of the obligations of the living. At the novel's center she and Cashwell pursue a tentative love affair, but it remains chaste and doomed in keeping with THE WIDOW's themes of constancy and faith; McGavock is, after all, married, if to a man in many ways as lifeless as the soldiers who died upon the field at Franklin.

Those dead soldiers -- their burial, exhumation, and ultimate re-burial in a place of safety and honor -- take up the remainder of the novel. Here Hicks returns to the framework of Carrie McGavock's real life story, and we watch as she takes up the work of preservation and memory that earned her her sobriquet. The McGavock homestead and Carrie McGavock's Confederate cemetery -- burying ground for some 1,500 dead -- are today open to the public in Franklin. Read THE WIDOW OF THE SOUTH before you go.

  Jon Clinch received an AB in English from Syracuse University in 1976, taught high school English for three years, and then became an advertising writer. For the past sixteen years he's run Clinch Advertising with his wife and partner, Wendy.

Two of Jon's short stories ran in John Gardner's prestigious Mss. magazine. His agented dark literary novel will be making the rounds of publishers shortly.