Review by New York Times Review
BAD historical novels - which is to say, most historical novels -are bad in exactly the same way: stuffed with the usual rogues' gallery of historically certified villains, they're banal costume dramas, predestined in their epiphanies and as insufferable in their virtue as a teenage vegan. The past is mere stage set for a morality play with a foregone conclusion. The heroes may wear hoopskirts or codpieces, but they possess the latest in glittering modern consciences. The Rebel drummer boy, for instance, discovers his affinity with the escaped slave instead of shooting him. Readers are made to feel superior to their ancestors. They think: We wouldn't have been Confederates, Nazis, Pharisees, Canaanites, Phalangiste, Visigoths and so on. And we certainly wouldn't have pranced about in a codpiece. Philipp Meyer's masterly second novel, "The Son," an epic of the American Southwest, represents a darkly exhilarating alternative to that sort of historical hooey. Like Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," it allows the past its otherness and its characters the dignity of blundering through the world as it was. These are not heroic transplants from the present, disguised in buckskin and loincloths. They are unrepentant, greedy, often homicidal lost souls, blindly groping their way through the 19th and 20th centuries, from the ordeals of the frontier to the more recent absurdities of celebrity culture. The progenitor - and most vivid character - of this multigenerational family saga spanning the years from 1836 to 2012 is Col. Eli McCullough, who will live to be a ripe (or, in his case, positively rank) centenarian. Born in Bastrop in Indian country on the same day Texas becomes a republic, he grows up fast on the frontier, a precocious font of vital lore: "Wolves run with their tails straight and proud while coyotes tuck them under like scolded dogs." He knows enough to patch his bullets with greased buckskin rather than cotton. McCullough is hardly out of short pants before he turns into an equal-opportunity killer. He kills Comanches when he's defending his family during a raid, white people when he rides with the Comanches after he's been kidnapped, then Comanches again when he returns, somewhat reluctantly, to the white world and becomes a Texas Ranger. As the Russian novelist Mikhail Zoshchenko once wrote about mankind in general, Eli McCullough "is excellently made and eagerly lives the kind of life that is being lived." There's a comic dispassion to his point of view, even when it comes at the expense of his loved ones. "I saw a body with its breasts cut off and its bowels draped around. I knew it was my sister but she no longer looked like herself." McCullough seems relieved when the Comanches finally finish off his philosophizing brother, who as a captive has an unfortunate tendency to burble on about Harvard and Emerson while tied up naked on horseback. "It's the fate, of a man like myself to be misunderstood," his brother tells their captors. "That's Goethe, in case you were wondering." Young Eli thrives as an Indian. Though he begins life in captivity as a slave to the women, forced to scrape buffalo hides all the livelong day, he gradually rises in the tribe's esteem. He hones his ability to use a bow and arrow while attacking on horseback. He takes scalps, white and Native American alike. And he learns that young Comanche gals like to "connubiate" under bearskin robes on long winter nights while their men are out raiding. What young man among us even to this day would have rather sat in a schoolhouse reading Emerson's essays when such a transcendental life was to be had on the open range? If played by Kevin Costner in the film version of his adventures, McCullough would have been shown going fully native and learning a heartwarming life lesson about aboriginal values that would have stayed with him during his dreary years back among his own race. But one of the many attributes of "The Son" is that it rarely treads the well-worn path. No culture, not even that of noble savages on the high plains, is revealed to have a genetic monopoly on virtue. Toshaway, McCullough's Comanche mentor, tells him "you only get rich by taking things from other people." And eventually Eli will agree: "It had become clear to me that the lives of the rich and famous were not so different from the lives of the Comanches: you did what you pleased and answered to no one." The Texas the McCulloughs make -or, more accurately, steal - is one where theft is soon whitewashed into ownership. That is the dirty truth around which this novel revolves. In time, Eli McCullough accumulates wealth and power through cattle, then oil, even though this requires commandeering his neighbor's property. "That is how the Garcias got the land, by cleaning off the Indians," he says by way of justification, "and that is how we had to get it. And one day that is how someone will get it from us." The Colonel, as he has become known, displays the energy and charming lack of scruples by which many an American fortune has been made. He exalts the dominion of the strong. "Men are meant to be ruled," he says. He practices an ethical flexibility that has traditionally served an ambitious Texan well. His views do not dispose him toward abolitionists, Mexicans, blacks, Yankees, business rivals, plantation gentlemen or, most notably, his own son, Peter, whom he cannot abide. Peter McCullough occupies the moral high ground of this lowly world, and is scorned as weak for it by one and all. He complains that his father "has no great respect for the Mexicans and yet they are all willing to die for him. I, on the other hand, consider myself their ally . . . and they despise me." He falls in love with a descendant of the family whose land the McCulloughs have taken, abandons his wife and hies off to Guadalajara after the object of his affections, exiling himself forever from his rapacious clan. HIS granddaughter Jeannie, whose story the novel weaves into the 21st century, starts life as a ranching prodigy, able to "flank and mug as well as her brothers," to "forefoot anything that moved." She worries about coyotes watching her calves, windmills that need gearboxes or sucker rods inspected. Later, she takes over the family oil business, obsessing over which drillers might be hired, what fields might be drilled. In old age, she lives alone in the family mansion, abandoned by her children, unable to instill in her grandsons a love for ranch life. Her attitudes are of a piece with those of her great-grandfather, the Colonel, whom she remembers shooting snakes in the dirt yard. "The strong took from the weak, only the weak believed otherwise," she says. She's the kind of sturdy Republican matron whose conservative views rarely get a nuanced airing in American literature. The "liberals would cheer her death," she thinks. "The whole time complaining about big oil." But she also remembers an age when the rich served as "exemplars"; now they were "as anxious for attention as any scullery maid." By the novel's end, Philipp Meyer has demonstrated that he can write a potboiler of the first rank, aswirl with pulpy pleasures: impossible love affairs, illicit sex, strife between fathers and sons, the unhappiness of the rich, the corruptions of power. (It might have been called "Gone With the Oil.") But these crowd-pleasing qualities should not distract from Meyer's Spenglerian treatment of the American empire, Southwestern branch. Only in the greatest of historical novels do we come to feel both the distance of the past and our own likely complicity in the sins of a former age, had we been a part of it. To that rank, we now add "The Son." Meyer's characters grope their way from the ordeals of the frontier to the absurdities of celebrity culture. Will Blythe is the author of "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 2, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Inside Meyer's massive Texas saga is perhaps the best Indian captive story ever written: in 1849, 13-year-old Eli McCullough is abducted by Comanches after they've raped his mother and sister. Eli adapts. He learns the language and how to hunt and raid, and by age 16, he's a fierce warrior. In the process, the reader is treated to a fascinating portrait of the Comanches, including a Melville-like cataloging of all they did with the buffalo. Eventually, young Eli returns to the white world, but after an affair with a judge's wife worthy of Little Big Man, he's forced into the Texas Rangers. Later still, he fights for the South and steals a fortune from the North. He returns to South Texas to found an unimaginably large ranch, which he adds to by trumping up a massacre of a distinguished Mexican family, the Garcias. No scion measures up to Eli, unless it's Jeanne, his great-granddaughter, who ruthlessly presides over her oil and gas well into the twenty-first century. And, in a different way, Peter, Eli's son, as softhearted as his father was ruthless, makes his mark. He alone laments the massacre of the Garcias, but he's an indifferent rancher, and his love affair with the only surviving Garcia threatens to disembowel the McCullough empire. If you want to build a place like Texas, Meyer seems to say, only ruthlessness will suffice. In his many pages, Meyer takes time to be critical of Edna Ferber, but his tale is best compared to Giant. Lonesome Dove also come to mind, as well as the novels of Douglas C. Jones, Alan LeMay, and Benjamin Capps.--Mort, John Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In chronicling the settlement and scourge of the American West, from the Comanche raids of the mid-19th century into the present era, Meyer never falters. The sweeping history of the McCullough dynasty unfolds across generations and through alternating remembrances of three masterfully drawn characters: Eli, the first white male born in a newly founded Texas, captured and raised by Comanche Indians; Eli's self-sacrificing son, Peter, who shuns everything his power-hungry father represents; and Jeannie, Eli's fiercely independent great-great-granddaughter, who inherits the family fortune. Chapters detailing Peter's affair with a Mexican neighbor and his moral struggle with his ancestors' bloody legacy are keenly balanced alongside those involving Jeannie's firm yet impassive rule over the modern McCullough estate. But it's the engrossing, sometimes grotesque descriptions of Eli's early tribal years-scalpings, mating rituals, and a fascinating few pages about the use of buffalo body parts that recalls Moby Dick-that are the stuff of Great American Literature. Like all destined classics, Meyer's second novel (after American Rust) speaks volumes about humanity-our insatiable greed, our inherent frailty, the endless cycle of conquer or be conquered. So, too, his characters' successes and failures serve as a constant reminder: "There is nothing we will not have mastered, except, of course, ourselves." Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME Entertainment. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Eli McCullough, the first male child born in the Republic of Texas, is kidnapped at age 13 by Comanches, and from then on his life becomes a study in conflict. During three years of living with the Indians, he wins their respect and is thought of as an upcoming chief. But by the time he turns 16, having mastered the art of scalping, he is set free. Forever restless, he becomes a Texas Ranger, a cattle rancher, and, later, a colonel in the Civil War. His son, Pete, is cut from a different cloth and rebels against his family's history of violence and anti-Mexican racism. His rebellion includes the love of a Mexican woman. Pete's daughter, Jeanne Anne, struggles to be taken seriously as a rancher and oil tycoon. The broody McCulloughs gain in wealth but often pay dearly. A strain of misunderstood lonesomeness hounds each generation. VERDICT Treading on similar ground to James Michener, Larry McMurtry, and Cormac McCarthy, Guggenheim Fellowship-winner Meyer (American Rust) brings the bloody, racially fraught history of Texas to life. Call it a family saga or an epic, this novel is a violent and harrowing read. [See Prepub Alert, 11/30/12.]-Keddy Ann Outlaw, formerly with Harris Cty. P. L., Houston (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The sins of the fathers are always visited upon the sons--and in Meyer's sweeping, absorbing epic, there are plenty of them. As the first child born in the new Republic of Texas, or so it's said, Eli McCullough fills big shoes. Yet he stands in the shadow of his older brother, who reads books and has a strange attachment to his sister--one that will be cut short when Comanches descend and, in a spree worthy of Cormac McCarthy, put an end to all that: "My mother had not made a sound since I woke up, even with the arrows sticking out of her, but she began to scream and cry when they scalped her, and I saw another Indian walking up to her with my father's broadax." Years living in semicaptivity with the Comanches teaches Eli a thing or two about setting goals and sticking to them, as well as a ruthlessness that will come in handy when he begins to build a cattle empire and accrue political power. His son is less deft; caught up in the cross-border upheaval of the Mexican Revolution, he finds himself out of place and adrift ("You're a big man," says one ranch hand to him, "and I don't see why you act like such a small one") and certainly no favorite of his ever-demanding father. Meyer's sophomore novel deftly opens with entwined, impending deaths across generations, joining tangled stories over three centuries, the contested line between the U.S. and Mexico, and very different cultures; if sometimes it hints of McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and Ferber's Giant, it more often partakes of the somber, doomed certainty of Faulkner: "There had been one grandson everyone liked, who had loved the ranch and been expected to take it over, but he had drowned in three feet of water." An expertly written tale of ancient crimes, with every period detail--and every detail, period--just right.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
