"I don't have to tell you what this land used to look like," he said. "And you don't have to tell me that I am the one who ruined it. Which I did, with my own hands, and ruined forever. You're old enough to remember when the grass between here and Canada was balls high to a Belgian, and yes it is possible that in a thousand years it will go back to what it once was, though it seems unlikely. But that is the story of the human race. Soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns. It is all we know how to do."
I was at a comedy festival the other night and the host was talking about being in Texas recently. "Do you know," he said, "there are grown-ass men in Texas who wake up every morning and dress up like cowboys? Seriously, every day they put on their belt buckles and bolo ties and cowboy boots and Stetsons. That's right: these men will leave their houses, in what to the rest of the world is considered an acceptable Halloween costume, yelling out, 'Okay honey, I'm off to the bank.'" This got big laughs in a crowd of frostbit Canadians, but since I spent a lot of years in the cattle and oil country of Alberta, I am sympathetic to the Texas mystique. And boy, does The Son ever revel in the Texas mystique.
In an interview with the National Post, Philipp Meyer said, "American Rust was about the decline of the American Dream, how our basic mythology had stopped being true. In The Son I wanted to explore the genesis of that mythology, where those ideas actually came from, and also to write about a time when that mythology more accurately reflected everyday life." To create his mythology, Meyer tells his story from the shifting points of view of three characters:
Eli McCullough is being interviewed by a WPA recorder on the occasion of his 100th birthday and looks back on his long life: from his birth on March 2, 1836 (later known as Texas Independence Day, making him, literally, the first man born in the state of Texas), through years he spent as a captive among a Comanche tribe, to his days fighting Indians in the Texas Rangers and the Civil War (and this war from a Texan's perspective was new ground for me), and his eventual establishment of a quarter million acre ranch -- the founding of a dynasty.
Peter McCullough, Eli's sensitive and misunderstood son, tells his story through journal entries, mostly set in 1917 -- a time when his family and the entire town is going to war against their Mexican friends and neighbours; a time when he seems to be the only principled person in the four counties that the family's ranch covers.
And Jeanne Anne McCullough, Eli's great-granddaughter, is, at 86 years old, paralyzed on the floor of the family's mansion, reviewing her life while trying to figure out her situation, in the modern setting of 2012. She remembers Eli -- "the Colonel" -- and the influence he had on her upbringing; her humiliating retreat from an Eastern boarding school; her expansion of the family's modest oil concerns into a megarich corporation; and, after the death of her husband, her attempts to retain her position of power in the macho world of the J. R. Ewings of Texas oil.
Covering, as it does, 7 generations of the McCullough family and over 150 years of the early days of Texas, The Son is certainly an epic, and as I knew nothing of this time and place, I found it to be interesting and informative and, for the most part, well written. In order to explain why that's qualified with "for the most part", there will be spoilers beyond:
When I first started reading The Son -- when Eli is captured by the Comanche and Peter is describing the raid on the Garcias and Jeanne is examining her childhood -- I found it to be totally fascinating -- enough so that I recommended it to a Texan friend whose husband immediately dove in. The storylines were exciting and the information was new and the structure of the three alternating voices was satisfying. As a matter of fact, I couldn't decide whose story I was enjoying more -- I wanted the excitement of Eli's story and the moral context of Peter's and the perspective of where it all leads to in Jeanne's...and then something fell apart for me. Near the end of Eli's captivity, there was, for example, a chapter listing all of the steps of killing and butchering a buffalo -- and while this was informative, there was no plot advancement in this part and it felt out of place (though, remembering that this is an old man reciting his life story, I did accept that he might have digressed like that, but this was just one example of listing information). And at around this point, Peter began to grate on me -- I had loved his character at first, needed for there to be one white man who didn't think that a massacre of the neighbours was an appropriate action, but as his wife eventually accused, he did seem to only love himself and his own sadness (what kind of cowboy keeps an actual written list of all the forms of loneliness?) -- I wanted Peter to grow some cajones. And with Jeanne -- I thought that Meyer did a credible job of capturing her early days by the branding fire, her efforts to prove herself alongside her brothers, her disastrous time at the boarding school and even her meeting and falling in love with Hank, but the chapters and chapters of her as a grown woman trying to fit in with the big boys of oil was not credible to me: they read like how a man thinks a woman would feel and act; this was Eli McCullough's great-granddaughter and she knew it; she should have acted like it.
And there was almost too much symmetry among the generations -- they all had a son who preferred books to hard work and only one child with a love for the land; and they all had sons dying young and sexual adventurers and reluctant mothers. With at least two gay men in the family, I suppose Meyer is making a genetic case for that as well (and this isn't me trying to suggest that people aren't born that way, just noting it's curious to see it running in the family, and when it's in a work of fiction, it seems to be trying to make a point).
And, on a very personal level, it felt like an attack on my favourite passage from one of my favourite authors (a harrowing scene from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy) when Eli explains that, contrary to what has been written, the Comanche did not dress themselves in found items like top hats and bridal veils. But then, quite a bit later, Meyer includes a raid the Comanche made on a fancy dress warehouse with them leaving in tuxedos and wedding gowns. That's a small complaint, but like I said, it was a personal affront.
And, eventually, the three alternating voices felt forced and as constricting to the narrative as the quirky structure that Eleanor Catton used in The Luminaries -- both tied the hands of their authors and limited how the stories could develop; it did not feel organic. And, upon reflection, the reason for each voice feels forced: Would Eli have sat down with a WPA recorder during the Depression? He didn't seem like the kind of man who would consent to that out of altruism, and if it was meant to be a legacy exercise -- a record of how his dynasty began -- I don't believe that Eli would have been so honest about the brutal and illegal acts he had committed. And I appreciate that Peter's diary permitted him to be honest and include his feelings, and allowed for there to be an accurate record left behind for future generations, but his diary wasn't written like a diary -- it was written like a novel with dialogue and narration. And, while I guess Jeanne was having a quasi-out-of-body-experience as she lay on the floor and reviewed her life, it grated on me that she referred to herself in the third person. The hand of the author was visible and distracting through the structure he forced upon himself.
And, if I could be permitted to nitpick one more thing: when Eli hunts down the last of the Indians and massacres their entire tribe and then finds that the chief's shield was stuffed with pages from Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I felt like I had been hit over the head with, "See here? Here's the point!"
But what I did like: the three voices did allow for the histories to be meted out slowly so that the reader doesn't understand the entire story until the very end. That Eli had murdered Pedro Garcia's uncle in the early days of the ranch helped to explain why he was so keen to finish the job years later. That Jeanne has read her grandfather's journal explains why there's a desperation to her working life; she has seen the shape of her family's hamartia. And, by the end, Peter is the perfect tragic figure -- by defying his father and running to Maria, he himself plants the seeds of his family's eventual destruction. And I liked that the story wasn't judgemental -- the white men were no worse than the Indians or the Mexicans or the Spanish who came before them; everyone has blood on their hands.
On the ranch they had found points from both the Clovis and the Folsom. For the eight thousand years between Folsom and the Spanish, no one knew what happened; there had been people here the whole time, but no one knew what they were called. Though right before the Spanish came there were the Mogollan and when the Spanish came there were the Suma, Jumano, Manso, La Junta, Concho and Chisos and Toboso, Ocana and Cacaxtle, the Coahuiltecans, Comecrudo…but whether they had wiped out the Mogollon or were descended from them, no one knew. They were all wiped out by the Apache. Who were in turn wiped out, in Texas anyway, by the Comanche. Who were in turn wiped out by the Americans.
Writing in The New York Times, reviewer Janet Maslin concludes: "The greatest things about The Son are its scope and ambition, not its strictly literary mettle. It’s an enveloping, extremely well-wrought, popular novel with passionate convictions about the people, places and battles that it conjures. That ought to be enough." That pretty much sums up my own assessment, and while I am not keen to question the authenticity of a banker in a bolo tie, dressing an epic up in Texas garb has its charms and its pitfalls and I leave it to posterity to determine if Meyer has succeeded in capturing the genesis of the American Dream; as a work of fiction I found it good, with moments of greatness, and that certainly is enough.
