Panoramic, harrowing and deeply evocative, The Son is a fully realized masterwork in the greatest tradition of the American canon—an unforgettable novel that combines the narrative prowess of Larry McMurtry with the knife-edge sharpness of Cormac McCarthy.
Philipp Meyer, the acclaimed author of American Rust, returns with The Son: an epic of the American West and a multigenerational saga of power, blood, land, and oil that follows the rise of one unforgettable Texas family, from the Comanche raids of the 1800s to the to the oil booms of the 20th century.
Review:
Philipp Meyer’s sweeping historical tale of Texas demands shelf space with Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurty. Like his predecessors, Meyer illustrates the ruthless, violent forms of blood-spilling murder it takes to build the future of a land. Death begets life.
People are conditioned to believe in their rights of land possession, and history point fingers at those who stole land from those that used to occupy it. Wars are fought over territory, and arguments continue on the authority of the privileged. But, as Meyer blazingly illuminates, the rights of possession were stolen from others, who scalped it from others, who poached it from others.
Told from the perspective of three narrators representing three generations of the Texas cattle baron and then oil baron McCullough family, and spanning the 19th-21st century, the tale takes the reader on a ferocious adventure of the birth and expansion of the Texas frontier. The legacies of fathers to sons (and one narrator, a daughter) are tough and soul scorching. The prose is as muscular and sinewy as a prized thoroughbred, the story as pitiless as a rattlesnake in a desert. And yet, there’s an undulating tenderness, a tremendous amount of empathy that is elicited from the reader.
The advance publicity compares Meyer with Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy. Both comparisons are apt: he has both McCarthy’s violent imagery and grim fatalism, and McMurtry’s narrative sweep and richly imagined characters. Meyer’s style is every bit as distinguished as McCarthy’s or McMurtry’s, and his attention to period detail is meticulous and persuasive. One of the book’s best chapters is Eli’s brief description of the different uses the Comanche made of a killed buffalo. As Eli tells it, they used every part except one. The one part they did not use, and the reason why they did not use it, adds a poignant, ironic sting to the end of the chapter.
The reason the McCullough family visited and frequently mentioned Fort Worth was because there was, on the north side of Fort Worth, a large abbatoir where most of the cattle were driven from other cities and towns to be slaughtered and distributed, hence, “Cow Town”. Locally, it was called the “packing house”. It was considered a very good job if an African-American or Mexican got a job there; it paid the poor more than most other local jobs.
The classic western genre glosses over the radical and comprehensive transformation of the land, though “True Grit” comes close with Rooster in a Wild West show, drinking coca cola, presumably still with real cocaine. Meyer probably gets the nits and grits even better than a master like George MacDonald Fraser of Flashman fame, or Laura Ingalls Wilder’s portrait of a few square meters of prairie. Steve Stirling’s pictures of the Los Angeles basin with a few farms but no monster water projects also deserves mention.
This American epic focuses on many themes. One is generational change and the progression from an agrarian and cattle-based economy to an oil-based economy. Take these lines: “Of course there is no doubt that the Indian lives closer to the earth and the natural gods…Unfortunately, there is no more room or that kind of living, Eli. You and my ancestors departed from it the moment they buried a seed in the ground and ceased to wander like other creatures.”
Another is man’s inhumanity to man: the brutal land grab and the dehumanization of those who are considered “not belonging” by every single segment: the Comanches, the Mexicans, and above all, the whites who fight tooth and nail to take more of what’s theirs.
And lastly, and most importantly, it is about the blood that runs through human history with Texas as a microcosm. Meyer writes, “The land was thirsty. Something primitive still in it, the land and people both; the only place like it she’d ever seen was Africa: savannah, perpetual heat and sun, thorns and blinding heat.
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