The Son

The Son, by Philipp Meyer, is an epic story of Texas, told through several generations of the same family, from the early days of the Republic to the present. Other books like this have been written, such as James Michener's Texas and Edna Ferber's Giant (not to mention the supermarket books like Texas Rich), but I doubt any have been as good or unsentimental as this one.

The book is mostly told from the viewpoint of three people. First is Eli McCullough, who as a boy is kidnapped by Comanches. He is raised as one, and becomes a young warrior, even killing white men. Later, when the tribe is decimated by illness, he returns to the white world, becomes a Texas Ranger and kills Comanches, and then starts a cattle ranch. He will become obscenely rich, getting into the oil business. He tells his story in the first person, on the occasion of his 100th birthday in 1936.

The second is the diary of Peter McCullough, Eli's son (and, ostensibly, the offspring of the title, though that could be debated). He begins his tale in the mid 1910s, when his family massacres a Mexican-American family to take their land. Peter is a different sort, and says: "How two men from the same stock might be so different...my father likely reckons my mother snuck off for congress with some poet, scrivener, or other nearsighted sniveling half-man. I have always seen myself as two people: the one before my mother died, fearless as his brothers, and the one after, like an owl on some branch, watching the rest move about in the sunlight."

Peter is disgusted with his father and his mercenary business practices. He takes up with a daughter of the slaughtered family, which disgraces his own relatives.

Thirdly is Jeannie Ann McCullough, the great-granddaughter of Eli. She is raised as a typical Texas girl, knowing how to ride, but is packed off to a New England boarding school, which she hates. She will, after her brothers are killed in World War II, take over the company, a woman in a man's world.

There is a lot here, and the best of it is Eli's story, at least for us Western fans. His time with the Indians and then later as a Ranger provide the highlights. I was reminded somewhat of Little Big Man, which is also about a white boy being raised by Indians, in that the Indians are always portrayed as the ones with common sense. "The white people are crazy. They all want to be rich, same as we do, but they do not admit to themselves that you only get rich by taking things from other people. They think that if you do not see the people you are stealing from, or if you do not know them, or if they do not look like you, it is not really stealing." Or, "this was the main difference between the whites and the Comanches, which was the whites were willing to trade all their freedom to live longer and eat better, and the Comanches were not willing to trade any of it."

I also loved Eli's comments on rangering and being a cowboy: "Rangering was not a career so much as a way to die young and get paid nothing for doing it; your chances of surviving a year with a company were about the same as not. The lucky ones ending up in an unmarked hole. The rest lost their topknots." "The life of the cowboy has been written about as if it were the pinnacle of freedom in the West but in fact it was a sleepless drudgery almost beyond imagination--five months of slavery to a pack of dumb brutes--and had I not been riding for my own brand I would not have lasted a day."

The linchpin of the novel is the massacre of the Mexican-Americans, who as Peter points out had been in Texas far longer than any white family. It becomes the stain on their souls, and old J.A., as she is called, will one day reap what the family has sowed. The ending, involving a simple Mexican vaquero with a complicated past, is very powerful.

The Son is not only a top-notch novel of the West, it also has profound things to say on the nature of white America and its ruthlessness in settling this country, which is something we white Americans should always feel a little guilty about.