The Son

“. . . will capture your attention from the first to the very last sentence.”

The Son by Philipp Meyer is a story that spans three centuries and five generations. It is a story of survival, of loss, of love.

The epic novel is related by three narrators at three different points in their history and in time: the colonel and patriarch, Eli McCullough; his great-granddaughter, Jeanne Anne McCullough (a.k.a. J. A. McCullough); and by his disappointing son Peter McCullough (not the son in the title: the colonel is The Son) each one with a distinct voice.

The story starts out toward the end of all of their lives and they slowly look back and tell their own stories as they saw it. The males tell their story in the first person, J. A.’s story is told in the third person—by design it seems since Jeanne Anne is a bit more distant than the other two characters and it suits her character just fine. She isn’t the touchy feely kind of character anyway. She is the practical sort.

Peter’s story is retold as diary entries, perfect for his character in that he is an introspective persona whose world exists between his two ears.

The character development is one of author Meyer’s assets. We see the colonel transform from an ordinary adolescent who doesn’t appreciate the effeminate characteristics of his brother to a ruthless marauder capable of skinning the scalp off any man (white or indigenous). Setting up the colonel’s life was his kidnapping by the Commanches from his home and his subsequent will to survive.

J. A.’s character starts off in life in the traditional role of a female of that time and stature and over time sheds traditional roles or “pearls” and transforms into a self-possessed captain of industry.
Peter is the acquiescent son trades his family loyalty for love. There is a Spanish saying: The skirt of a woman pulls more than yoked oxen. For Peter, it did.

It is not a Freudian stretch to imagine the Colonel as the id, Peter as the super-ego, and Jeanne Anne as the ego of the McCullough Clan psyche. Jeanne Anne mediates between the singular value of the Colonel—survive at all costs—and the high-mindedness of Peter.

Right from the start, through the colonel’s retelling, the author gives us a Texas history lesson to set up his story: that the Spanish were in Texas since the times of Columbus disseminating the indigenous populations; that the Mexicans wanted to throw the Anglos out of Texas as their numbers grew in the 1830s; and that Texas was its own country before it was a state.

In the framework of the novel, Mr. Meyer’s story depicts the bloodthirsty way the west was won from the Aztecs, from the Spanish, from the Mexicans, the Apaches, from the Commanches, but not in a gratuitous way.

This book is definitely not for the squeamish with its vivid scenes of murder, rape, decapitation, scalping, pillage, and torture throughout, none of which Mr. Meyer relays in a judgmental manner, rather he is reporting, certainly close inside his characters’ heads, seeing what they see, feeling what they feel, even the horrific, the bestial. Wiping out your neighbor and everything that is theirs is all in a day’s work. Think Joseph Conrad with more than one Captain Kurtz.

If you approach a western novel with a stake and cross at the ready, fear not. Mr. Meyer’s un-formulaic storytelling will capture your attention from the first to the very last sentence. There is no bibliography, so whether the characterization of Texas at the time is true or not does not take away from the art in the story.

Mr. Meyer’s meticulous description of the Texan landscape puts the reader right there among the prairie foliage, dust, animal population, and landscape where you can see, smell, taste, feel, and hear what the narrator does.

“We could see thirty or forty miles, an expanse of badlands going on in every direction, the river smacking between mesas, buttes, and hoodoos, uncountable side canyons and rolling hills, motts of juniper and shinnery oak. The land was greening up, the hackberries and cottonwoods along all the streams, the grama and little bluestem on the river flats, and it was pleasant with the redrock buttes and green valleys and the darkening sky overhead.”

The beauty in this novel is that it is a great story, artfully crafted, the two ingredients for a superb read. It is a very different coming of age for America than what is taught in school.

Settlers, Mexicans, Spaniards, and Native Americans are portrayed as Machiavellian, interested only in seeking out their own wellbeing at all cost, even within their own communities. No one ethnicity escapes honest scrutiny by Mr. Meyer, rather his Darwinian perspective is on all of humanity and how without a government construct based on the value of all humans to co-exist, one group, the stronger, will certainly prevail . . . for a time, i.e., the Roman empire.

Peter’s tongue-in-cheek comment, “My brother Phineas is truly the most advanced among them, has nothing against the Mexican or any other race, he sees it simply as a matter of economics. Science rather than emotion. The strong must be encouraged, the weak allowed to perish . . .” illustrates Peter’s character as the moral compass of the saga, chronicling his McCullough dynasty’s exploits far and wide.

Mr. Meyer uses both Spanish and Commanche language in the text, words like bruja and curandero adding authenticity to his tale. The language is rich.

Although there is no guide in the book for reading or pronouncing Commanche, another choice to question is the use of the phrase “double down” when Phineas (Peter’s brother) tells Peter “It’s Darwin at work Pete. Dilution is what the situation called for, but Pedro decided to double down.” Although it is a gambling term that may or may not have existed in 1915, the context in which it was used seems 21st century.

The themes of Manifest Destiny, inevitability, and divine providence prevail throughout the book—except for Peter who questions and contradicts—albeit privately, to himself. Of the three characters he is the most appealing due to his vulnerability and uncertainty in his family loyalty. J. A. never questions her family loyalty. The colonel never questions anything, least of all himself.

The Son will be a classic of American literature if not already. A highly recommended novel by a masterful writer.