In Philipp Meyer's "The Son," it doesn't take a Comanche raiding party, an assault from gun-happy Texas Rangers or an old-fashioned shootout to fill the eye of the reader's mind with blood and gore. To be sure, there is enough violence in this beautiful book to make Tarantino fans blush and to warrant automatic Cormac McCarthy comparisons. This is, after all, frontier Texas, which is as close a representation as we have in literature of America in its purest, most primitive form, the kind of America that England most certainly was not. And McCarthy is the dean of this bleak, masculine Texas, a country truly unfit for the squeamish man.
Yet Meyer's voice bears little resemblance to McCarthy's, whose brilliant, distinct brand of bleakness has made him as easy target for caricature as Ernest Hemingway. One need look no further than YelpingWithCormac.tumbr.com, which features the following review of American Apparel: "A stinking host clad in patchwork tunics of brightest cotton. As if
their carnival colors could mask the blackness of their nature."
Meyer doesn't pull punches in describing the horrific violence, but instead of one voice, he gives us at least five. The strongest voice, and the one that will resonate loudest after "The Son" concludes, belongs to Eli McCullough, the first son we encounter in this multi-generational Texas epic. Abandoned by his father, a wayward Ranger, Eli sees his family get massacred by a Comanche raiding party, which kidnaps and ultimately adopts him. Over the course of the book, Eli's story is the story of early Texas: the frontier wars, the rise of the Rangers, a stint in the Confederacy, the cattle drives and, ultimately, oil. His presence looms large even in chapters devoted to other members of his clan, his sentimental son, Peter (the most relatable but least appealing character in the novel... in short, the anti-Eli) and Peter's granddaughter, Jeannie, the new McCullough matriarch who takes us into the present.
Meyer's narrative device works wonders. Each generation informs the other. By reading Peter and Jeannie's musings, we come to appreciate Eli and how he became what he is. He is a ruthless bastard, eager with a gun and quick to dispense justice. Like Omar on "The Wire" (another popular comparison), he is a killer who understands the old maxim, "Man gotta have a code."
But it doesn't take murder to get to the blood and guts in The Son." Sometimes, it takes a simple exposition about nourishment from the priceless section when Eli lives with the Comanches.
"If water was scarce, the veins of animals were opened and the blood drunk before it had time to clot. The skull was cracked, the brains stirred on rawhide and eaten as well, being fatty and tender; the teats of any lactating cows were cut and the warm milk sucked directly from them. If the brains were not eaten immediately they were taken to tan hides; every animal has enough brains to tan its own hide, except the buffalo, which was too large."
There is beauty in Meyer's violent scenes, whether spoken by Colonel or (by Texas standards) lesser men. His lyricism and eye for detail are apparent when Peter -- the pacifist black sheep who dares fall in love with a Mexican woman -- describes the shootout that ensues after a few horses get stolen from his property. Eager for vengeance, Colonel (as Eli is later known) goes off to seek justice, accompanied by his men and a small squad of trigger-happy Rangers. Peter's attempt to approach the Garcia household peacefully falls flat and within minutes a fuselage of bullets rains on the Garcia house.
"The bullets continued to snap overhead. I was looking at Bill Hollis when a pale cloud appeared and his eyes went wide as if he's had some realization. His rifle clattered over the wall and he lay down his head as if taking a nap. I had a vision of him playing the fiddle in our parlor while his brother sang."
From this chaos comes order -- the state of Texas that plays by its own rules, where a man's word is worth more than a lawyer's contract; where killing a thief is an God-given right; where nonviolence is weakness; where family matters and business is pleasure. "The Son" explains Ron Paul's libertarianism and Rick Perry's swagger. It doesn't explain why Texas just declared war on abortion, but it does explain why it doesn't give a rats ass about how people like me feel about this war. "What, then, is the American, this new man?" J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur famously asked in 1782. "Here I am, you son of a bitch," Eli McCullough replies.
The mood gets more somber and reflective when we get to the Jeannie chapters (also known as the J.A. McCullough chapters, depending on her age at the time of writing). She is old now, and there is proud wisdom in her voice as she reflects on the many glass ceilings she had to break to become the family's last oil tycoon. In her early years, she has to face the usual sexism and distrust from the hypocritical traditionalists around her. "She was a slut or a dyke or a whore. A man trapped in a woman's body ..." she reflects at one point. At another, she considers the difference between her and the other oil men.
"To be a man meant not living by any rules at all," J.A. McCullough ponders late in life. "You could say one thing in church and another at the bar and somehow both were true. You could be a good husband and father and Christian and bed every secretary, waitress, and prostitute that caught your eye."
Through her successes and anxieties, Jeannie shows herself to be Eli's perfect grandson. She picks up the main threads of Meyer's majestic, survivalist narratives and demonstrates the cyclical nature of time. Texas is a different world now, but how little it has changed, the Jeannie chapters teach us. In the most simplistic sense possible, it's a modern state with a frontier soul. It has our respect, not that it wants it.
Which brings us back to de Crevecoeur and his question. For him, an American was an immigrant whose experience pulls him apart from Europe. This process, he concluded, extinguishes in the process "all his European prejudices" and forces him to forget the "servility of disposition which poverty has taught him." The Texas of Philipp Meyer has its share of servility and poverty, racism and class hierarchy, torture and death, but these things barely obscure the American spirit de Crevecoeur identified a century before the Colonel struck gold. Money and power still rule, but these commodities are generally amassed through a ruthless, bloody meritocracy -- a quality that justifiably makes the nation proud. There are no powdered wigs in "The Son."
The veterans in the early chapter weren't born on cotton plantation; they are survivors who paid their dues through blood, skill and toughness. If you steal the Colonel's horses, he will track you down, call you pard'ner, engage you in a bit of small talk, hang a noose around your neck, tie the rope to a tree and tell you that it's either here and now or the sheriff later, so why waste time? No one argues. Everyone understands the rules. Good or evil, this is the bleak and beautiful Darwinism in Meyer's Texas. Or, as they say in David Simon's Baltimore, "It's all in the game."
