Book Review: The Son (2013) by Phillipp Meyer

A lot of the reviews of The Son have labeled it as The Great American Novel. I won't give The Son that award, but it's definitely a great American novel. It's tempting to call it The Great American Novel because Meyer has taken a hard look at his country through the prism of Texas' history and decided that America's past, when reduced to its ugly essentials, is a story of rapacious colonization and the ruthless exploitation of labour and natural resources, with the wheels of both processes greased by violence and racism. The history of Texas provides plenty of examples to prove Meyer's thesis.

The Son is the story of the McCullough family, from their arrival in Texas as settlers in the 1830s right up to their eventual status as oil barons in 2012. The story is told through the voices of three different generations of McCulloughs: Eli, Peter and Jeanne. Eli is the founder of the family fortune. Captured by Comanches at the age of thirteen, he eventually bonds completely with his captors and becomes a warrior, happily taking white scalps along with his fellow braves. The Comanche, along with other Indian tribes, succumb to disease and white expansion, and Eli rejoins the white world and becomes a Texas Ranger. The grubstake Eli uses to make his fortune comes courtesy of his armed, and bloody, robbery of a Union supply column carrying gold. Soon after that he begins acquiring land in west Texas. Peter, Eli's son, is born in 1870 and his section of the saga covers the years 1915-17, during which the Texas Border Wars with Mexico are raging. Eli is still alive at this time (he lives to the ripe age of 100) and uses the wars as a pretext for slaughtering his neighbors, the Garcias, and stealing their land through a legal subterfuge. Peter is appalled by his father's actions and the moral character of his peers and state, and eventually makes a complete break with his family by disappearing into Mexico. Jeanne is born in 1926 and completes the family's transition (begun by Eli) from land and cattle to oil.

The Eli section of the novel is one of the great western stories in American literature, albeit one that probably owes a debt of inspiration to Thomas Berger's Little Big Man. Eli's story is exuberantly raw, bloody, violent and cruel. You could call this America in its proto-capitalist phase, when all you needed to do to get ahead of the other guy was to kill him and steal all his belongings, as well as slaughtering his family. Eli is the "son" of the novel's title. He's cursed with being a product of two patriarchal cultures. From his Comanche side he gets a high tolerance for the suffering of others and a fierce sense of tribal loyalty. From the American side he gets a burning desire to own and possess everything, and from both influences he receives lessons in the utility and pleasures of violence.

Peter is the first in the family's history to realize that their clan and caste are a curse upon the land. His tragedy is that his moral viewpoint isn't backed up by a high enough degree of moral courage. Peter makes an attempt to prevent his father massacring the Garcias, but, by his own reckoning, he doesn't do enough and finds he can't live with the guilt until an opportunity comes to redeem himself. Peter is the most complex character in the novel, and if it sometimes feels like Peter has wandered in from a William Faulkner novel, that's intended as a compliment to Meyer because parts of the novel are the equal of Faulkner.

The Jeanne section of the novel is the weakest of the three. It feels like Meyer just isn't sure what to do with this character or the story and ends up, well, faffing about a bit. Eli started his fortune entirely through violence, while the events of 1915 in Peter's part of the story shows the McCulloughs expanding their wealth through a combination of violence and legal trickery, and I think Meyer wanted to show how, over time, American capitalism was able to engage in thievery without the use of violence. At one point we learn that Jeanne has profited enormously from the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, and there are hints she's involved in shady dealings in the Middle East, but this idea isn't fully developed. Instead, the story flits around without settling on a theme or central issue, and the climax, which involves a distant, and unknown, Mexican relative feels contrived.

Even with some bumps along the way, The Son is always compulsively readable. Like Texas, Meyer's writing is big and bold, but at the same time he can deftly and poetically describe the beauty of western landscapes or the intricate details of daily life in a Comanche camp. Parts of this novel are very raw and cruel, but this fits into the author's goal of showing the savage roots of American expansionism. I should walk that last statement back a bit and point out that Meyer also argues that violence and ruthless acquisitiveness are part of the human condition. Meyer does this by not sugarcoating his Comanche characters with any kind of  "noble savage" nonsense. They, like the invading whites, have a taste for theft and violence, and as several Comanche characters point out, long before the whites arrived the indigenous peoples were enthusiastically slaughtering each other. This isn't the Great American Novel, but if you paired it with Charles Portis' Masters of Atlantis (my review) you'd have the yin and yang of America, or perhaps what could be called the Great American Reading Experience.

Masters of Atlantis (1983) by Charles Portis

If Masters of Atlantis isn't the Great American Novel, it's surely the Great American Comic Novel. Say the words "great novel" and one instantly thinks of a work of fiction that tackles important moral questions, significant social issues, and moments of historic import; the sort of book one imagines was written by someone with a brow constantly furrowed in thought, living in a room with a single window facing a brick wall, and who only took brief breaks from the Underwood  in order to light unfiltered Camels, all the better to furrow his or her brow even more. But does a nation's great novel have to adopt a stern and forbidding mien? By my own definition a great national novel should be one that you could hand to an extraterrestrial and say, "Here's the one book that tells you all about the essential character of the people whose nation you've just landed in/enslaved/vaporized." And by that criteria Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis (author of True Grit) is, for me, the Great American Novel. And I like to imagine it was written in the summer on a porch shaded by wisteria vines, the author stopping occasionally for a snack of iced tea and red velvet cake.

From the outside looking in, America's personality dial is permanently set to 11 with citizens who are charming, maddening, innocent, foolish, xenophobic, gullible, optimistic, crafty, adventurous, bigoted, energetic, and ignorant, not forgetting all the go-getters, do-gooders and flim-flam men. This crazy quilt of emotions and characters is brilliantly portrayed in Masters, woven into a story that revolves around what might be the core of the American character: belief. More on this later.

The novel opens at the end of World War One with young Lamar Jimmerson, an American soldier, being sold the Codex Pappus, a bundle of papers that's supposed to represent the collected wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis. And from that beginning, Jimmerson, who has an unshakable belief in his Atlantean lore, more or less accidentally founds a cult called Gnomonism with himself at its head. His title is the "Master." The cult's popularity waxes and wanes, reaching its zenith in the 1930s, and ending in that most American of dwellings, a double-wide trailer home. The plot, like so many of the characters in the book, is almost rudderless, but this is far from being a fault, it's simply reflecting the rootless, peripatetic side of American life.

Along the way Jimmerson is aided and hindered by a cavalcade of American archetypes and eccentrics. The most notable of the bunch is Austin Popper and his sidekick Squanto, a talking blue jay. Popper is the distillate that would result from boiling down Elmer Gantry, Bob Hope and Foghorn Leghorn. Jimmerson is a kindly fool whose affability and credulity blinds him to the charlatans and nitwits who are pulled into Gnomonism's weak gravitational field. The female characters, it should be noted, are the only ones who seem to be possessed with an ounce of common sense.

Portis' comic style is best described as deadpan; he tells tall tales in the plainest possible way, and that matter-of-factness, his attention to the niggling details of eccentricity, produces some sublime humor. Portis' comedy is never shouty or jokey; it's like a low frequency vibration that turns solids into liquids, or in this case, turns some of the more self-important aspects of the American character into comic gold. And like the very best comic writers (P.G. Wodehouse springs to mind) you can flip to almost any page of the book and find something delightful:

"Through a friend at the big Chicago marketing firm of Targeted Sales, Inc., he got his hands on a mailing list titled Odd Birds of Illinois and Indiana, which, by no means exhaustive, contained the names of some seven hundred men who ordered strange merchandise through the mail, went to court often, wrote letters to the editor, wore unusual headgear, kept rooms that were filled with rocks or old newspapers. In short, independent thinkers who might be more receptive to the Atlantean lore than the general run of men."

And..

     "You think you can treat me this way because I'm poor and have to go to night law school."
     "All law schools should be conducted at night."

And...

"He boiled some eggs, a long business at this altitude, and made coffee with the same water. He ate two eggs and left two for Cezar. On one he idly scrawled, Help. Captive. Gypsy caravan."

If there's one grand, unifying theme to the novel it's Portis' identification of the fact that Americans are the most enthusiastic believers on the planet. Their nation was founded, in part, by people looking to follow religious beliefs that Europeans viewed as dangerous or eccentric, and ever since then the US has lead the world in the production of cults and crazes, everything from Mormonism to Scientology to birthers. It's a nation that sometimes seems to be filled with people who think that with just the right formula or mantra or revelation or algorithm, the final, absolute, one-size-fits-all Truth will be revealed to the chosen. And no other country could produce so many social clubs like the Shriners, Moose Lodge, Optimists, and Rotarians, just to name a few. It would seem that if you took three random Americans and locked them in a room, after an hour they would emerge with a new religion, conspiracy theory or service club. Possibly all three. But what Americans believe in most of all is America; it's a cult and a religion, and if you don't believe me just take note of how omnipresent the American flag is in the American landscape. The US is awash in representations of Old Glory, and in that regard it's unique among democracies. Flag worship is the litmus test for any totalitarian state, but in the US of A the common citizens have turned the Stars and Stripes into a red, white and blue Shroud of Turin.

I've read Masters several times, and what motivated me to do this review is The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film. It's a pretty poor effort (my review) about the leader of a Scientology-like cult. It's really the photographic negative, unfunny version of Masters of Atlantis, but it made me wish someone, preferably the Coen brothers, would take a crack at filming Portis' novel. But until that happens, and you want to experience a fictional look at America's obsession with cults, stick to Portis.