Novelist Philipp Meyer (American Rust) reads from his newest book, The Son, June 10 at 7 p.m. at Elliott Bay Book Company.
“[F]ortune,” goes the epigraph from Edward Gibbon at the outset of The Son, “spares neither man nor the proudest of his works,” and to prove the point, Philipp Meyer then goes on to chronicle the rising and falling of human affairs, specifically, those of the McCullough clan in Texas, from the mid-19th-century when the Republic’s dissenters included Comanches and Mexican landholders, until the present day, as death approaches for Jeanne Anne McCullough, an oil baroness from an age and industry where women needn’t apply.
Don’t be put off by the crusty orotundity of Colonel Eli McCullough in the opening few pages (presented as if extracted from a 1936 WPA oral history), as Meyer swiftly finds a more engaging voice in which to tell Eli’s — and Texas’s — story. (You look in on his son Peter’s life via a diary, and enter directly the senility-confused mind of great-granddaughter Jeannie.)
As a young boy, Eli loses most of his family in a Comanche raid on their ranch, though he ends up adopted by one. Meyer captures the immediacy of long-ago days, and is scrupulously faithful to the world as Eli perceives it:
The Indians were ignoring us and talking among themselves, ums and ughs, grunts, no language at all, though they had words that sounded Spanish, and one word, taibo, they said to us often, taibo this and taibo that. We were barefoot and it was dark and I tried not to kick a prickly pear or be tromped on by the horses stamping and pacing.
Reality evolves on you, though. Soon enough, Eli’s vocabulary expands: “paa, water; tuhuya, horse; tehcaró, eat. Tunetsuka — keep going.” The Comanches enter him into a remedial program where he learns how to prepare a buffalo hide, and make necessary tools from animal sinew. “By comparison,” thinks Eli, “we were dumb as steers. They could not understand why they had not defeated us.”
Eli will consider himself, in later life, Indian, not Christian. His ruthlessness in defense of his “tribe,” and willingness to take advantage of social structures he doesn’t necessarily believe in, make him an empire builder.
His son Peter can’t stand the way Eli manipulates the local Mexican inhabitants, who respect Eli as a sometimes-brutal, sometimes-beneficent “lord of the manor” in a way that they don’t respect Peter. Where Eli’s defining experience was his childhood abduction, Peter is an adult when a neighboring Mexican family is massacred — how horrible it is to slaughter innocents (and how justifiable it is when it “needs doing”) becomes a theme of the book.
By the time Jeannie kicks up her traces at an attempt to socialize her in a boarding school back East, the vast McCullough ranch has become a devouring thing, emblematic of a Texas that, through grazing, has scoured itself to the topsoil, and can only be propped up by the titanic amounts of money that oil discovery unleashed. She has in her Eli’s capacity to join with the raiders (instead of Comanches, oil firms are the new predators) and learn their ways, at the expense of cattle-raising culture — which in turn came at the expense of farmers, who had settled expropriated tribal land.
Meyer made several winning choices in telling his epic, most notably to forego epic expanses of strictly chronological storytelling. At 561 pages, The Son nevertheless speeds along because chapters from the storylines are intercut with one another; each generation gets their say, as they understand it. It lends poignancy to the tendency people have to imagine that if they’d been for forty or fifty years earlier or later, they might have had a better life. But it also keeps the reader situated in a time-hopping “now” that keeps you turning pages late into the night.
And while Meyer judiciously salts his characters’ speech with dialect (Eli feels “dauncy,” for instance), he also imagines people speaking forthrightly, not for the pages of history or old Western movies, with their ums and ughs. The Comanche Escuté says, ” My arm hurts so bad I can’t sleep but you don’t hear me whining like a child. Kill some Mexicans, die a hero. I don’t give a fuck, but this talking is pointless, you might as well cut your own throat, and the throats of your people while you’re at it.”
These are visceral, dusty, bloody pages, but they are hard to let go of.