The Son audiobook

”’I don’t have to tell you what this land used to look like,’ he said. ‘And you don’t have to tell me that I am the one who ruined it. Which I did, with my own hands, and ruined forever. You’re old enough to remember when the grass between here and Canada was balls high to a Belgian, and yes it is possible that in a thousand years it will go back to what it once was, though it seems unlikely. But that is the story of the human race. Soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns. It is all we know how to do.’” The making of the West, or in my opinion the unmaking of the West, can best be described with the word eradication. Numerous species of animals, but most noticeably the wholesale slaughter of the massive buffalo herds, are part of the agenda to clear the way for further exploitation. The Indians are pesky and do not go gentle into that good night, but eventually they too are decimated by bullets and disease to the point that the last few Indians, like survivors from a post-apocalyptic event, are herded onto reservations by these alien white devil invaders where, if they are lucky, they can manage to drink themselves to death before they starve. The grass is eaten down by cattle to the point that it will never be as majestic as when the Spanish conquistador Coronado made his way across the prairie. Sodbusters come in after most of the blood has been spilled, to till up the soil, which eventually leads to the Dust Bowl in the Dirty Thirties. Hubris, lots of hubris. The story of the West is not an uplifting experience. Sure, there are great stories about survival against the elements, or the bear BAR attack that Hugh Glass was too stubborn to let kill him, or the story of men who stand up to those who are taking advantage of those weaker than themselves. It is about beating the odds with some combination in equal measure of skill and luck. We can romanticize the making of the West and ignore the sordid details, or even turn those rather bloody details into something more akin to a crusade to free the land from the infidels. It depends on a person’s capability of concocting elaborate, but well edited, fantasies, not that there aren’t things to admire in these people who put their lives on the line to find a better life for themselves and those who will come after them.The center of this universe is Eli McCullough and his descendents. They are doomed to live in his shadow. His life is not easy; in fact, it starts out so dire that I’d have laid good odds this was one man who was not going to live long enough to make any impact on history. I’d have been wrong.Eli watches his mother and sister be raped and butchered by Comanches. He watches his brother die by clubbing. He is spared because he is young enough to be integrated into the tribe and is adopted by Toshaway. ”“But the whites do not think this way-- they prefer to forget that everything they want already belongs to someone else. They think, “Oh I am white, this must be mine.” And they believe it, Tiehteti. I have never seen a white person who did not look surprised when you killed them.’ He shrugged. ’Me, when I steal something, I expect the person to try to kill me, and I know the song I will sing when I die.’” Now, what is interesting is, as Eli gets older, we hear him paraphrasing Toshaway’s philosophy to justify is his own actions. ”The Garcias got the land, by cleaning off the Indians, and that is how we had to get it. And one day that is how someone will get it from us. Which I encourage you not to forget.” He is fully aware of how temporary his hold is on anything he owns and knows that no one owns anything that they didn’t in some form or fashion take from someone else. I’d go into how those rich people that Americans seem to venerate so much became rich, but I think we all know that story, and it dovetails perfectly with Eli’s philosophy about ownership. Toshaway calls Eli Tiehteti, which is his Indian name meaning pathetic little white man. What is interesting is the Comanches may have their names changed many times in their lifetime to better fit who they have become. There is a woman who becomes Hates to Work. A captive German girl is called Yellow Hair Between the Legs. My favorite though is the poor bastard who is called Cock That Stays Hard. If they were labeled with a name they didn’t like, they would just have to work diligently to become known for something more distinguished. The book spans seven generations, but there are three main characters who we spend the most time with: Eli McCullough, his son Peter, and Eli’s great-granddaughter Jeanne Anne. Peter is the most affected by living in the shadow of his now iconic and famous father. He is a more sensitive soul who wants to live a more principled life than the one carved out by his father. ”I went upstairs to my office, lay in the dark among my books--the only comforting thing I have. An exile in my own house, my own family, maybe in my own country.” He says country, but what he really means is Texas with a larger than just capital T. His isolation increases as his sons identify more with Eli and embrace his no holds barred approach to holding onto and acquiring everything one can. Peter falls in love with a woman with the wrong last name...Garcia, which brings him into more conflict with his father. Jeanne Anne ends up owning the bulk of the estate. McCullough men keep dying in wars, misadventure, and some just wander off to make their own way in the world. It isn’t easy being a woman in a man’s world. Like Peter, she feels her isolation keenly. ”People made no sense to her. Men, with whom she had everything in common, did not want her around. Women, with whom she had nothing in common, smiled too much, laughed too loud, and mostly reminded her of small dogs, their lives lost in interior decorating and other people's’ outfits. There has never been a place for a person like her.”There are so many astute quotes. The book is frankly a quote machine. One of my favorites is when Eli makes the observation that his employees have become caricatures of themselves. The frontier had not yet settled when Buffalo Bill began his shows and the Colonel always complained about the moment his cowboys began to read novels about other cowboys; they had lost track of which was more true, the books or their own lives.” This is an epic about monumental pioneers who are revealed to us by the deft pen of Philipp Meyer as real people with faults and goodness in equal measure. I think it is interesting how little these people from each generation really know about each other. Strengths are seen as weaknesses, and weaknesses are perceived as strengths. It makes me think about how little I really know about my father, my grandmother or any of my relatives. What do my kids really know about me? Tonight, April 8th, 2017, AMC is debuting the series based on this book. I plan on watching it and will be ”packing my gun loose.” Here is the trailer: The Son on AMC”I content myself to think that one day we will all be nothing but marks in stone. Iron stains of blood, black of our carbon, a hardening clay.”Our ownership of anything is temporary. Our riches, in the scope of history, are almost made irrelevant soon after amassing them. As Jeanne says regarding heaven: “Trump, Walton, Gates, herself; they would be no more interesting than the garbagemen.” Frankly, I find them terminally boring now. A balanced, real view of the West that I highly recommend. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

HOW THE WEST SOUTHWEST WAS WON OVERRUN On the ranch they had found points from both the Clovis and the Folsom. For the eight thousand years between Folsom and the Spanish, no one knew what happened; there had been people here the whole time, but no one knew what they were called. Though right before the Spanish came there were the Mogollan and when the Spanish came there were the Suma, Jumano, Manso, La Junta, Concho and Chisos and Toboso, Ocana and Cacaxtle, the Coahuiltecans, Comecrudo…but whether they had wiped out the Mogollon or were descended from them, no one knew. They were all wiped out by the Apache. Who were in turn wiped out, in Texas anyway, by the Comanche. Who were in turn wiped out by the Americans. A man, a life—it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were. The Son is a magnificent family saga, covering two hundred years of Texan, but more significantly American history. Do not be fooled into thinking this is just a book about the Longhorn state. In the same way that Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk (also set in Texas) took a specific day to stand for an entire period, The Son takes a much larger swath but remains a stand-in for the nation as a whole. A ranching and oil dynasty rises in parallel with the USA rising as a global power. Items covered include the settlement of Texas by Americans, Indian Wars (sometimes from the perspective of the Indians), The Civil War, WW I, WW II, the Depression. Economic shifts, rise of oil in international importance, significance of corruption in government, impact of increasing difficulty of drilling in the USA and rise of the Middle East as the world’s major source of oil, including some economic intrigue involving the use of insider information. The misuse of the land is raised, as is the complicated relationships between residents of Mexico, Texas, and some who traveled both sides of the border. Meyer splits the task of looking at different times in American history among three members of the McCullough dynasty. Eli McCullough is the patriarch of this clan, born not on the Fourth of July, but on the Second of March, 1836, otherwise known as Texas Independence Day. He is, literally, the first Texan. (Well, as with the US Declaration of Independence, it was not completely Ok’d until the next day, but who’s counting?) and is as large a character as the state itself. We meet him when he is 100 years old, in 1936, looking back on his life and times, (a la Jack Crabb in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man) and some bloody times they were. Early settlers into what was still Mexico overwhelming the locals with numbers and guns. Bloodshed aplenty as a new population displaces current residents, whether Mexican citizens or one of the many Indian tribes in the area. Eli is captured by a Comanche raiding party that kills and abuses most of his family. Later he becomes a Texas Ranger, as a substitute for criminal prosecution, making the Rangers remind one of the French Foreign Legion. The second perspective is that of Jeanne Anne McCullough, Eli’s great-granddaughter. We meet her at age 86, injured, on the floor of her home in 2012, and are treated to her recollections as well. She is the primary female character here, a crusty old bird who is also shown in softer light earlier in her life. But while softer, Jeanne was still tough even as a kid, eager to cowgirl up, take on tasks usually reserved for men, and was unable and unwilling to adapt to the very different expectations of northeastern refinery. Adaptation, and recognizing change, seeing the truth in front of her, or not, figures in her journey. She will use ill-gotten knowledge for personal gain some day.Finally there is Peter, born in 1870, one of Eli’s sons, and Jeanne’s grandfather. Peter is the superego to Eli’s id. He struggles with what he sees as excessive violence in which his father revels, and tries as best he can to act in a moral way. I found Peter’s character to be the most real of the three. Constantly having to manage moral as well as physical conflict. He is the romantic of the crew. You will love him.We see all three come of age in very different ways. Eli is taken captive by raiding Comanches as a thirteen-year-old (view spoiler)[but over an extended period, relying on his courage and quick wits, he learns the rules and the ways of the tribe, coming to see many things from their perspective, and becomes a respected leader. We get to see him again, struggling to adapt to white society while still a teen. (hide spoiler)] We see Jeanne wanting to be who she is but struggling against the bias of the age that preferred its women less hardy, adventurous and determined. We see Peter struggling to reconcile his family and community responsibilities as a young man with the cruelty of his father and the racist townspeople determined to drive out the other, who happen to be people he knows, respects and even loves. There is enough carnage in The Son to make fans of Cormac McCarthy lock and load. One particularly brutal event is nothing less than anti-Mexican pogrom. And there is enough political inspection to make fans of Steinbeck perk up when Eli says things like: let the records show that the better classes, the Austins and Houstons, were all content to remain citizens of Mexico so long as they could keep their land. Their descendants have waged wars of propaganda to clear their names and have them declared Founders of Texas. In truth it was only the men like my father, who had nothing, who pushed Texas into war.Meyer also notes several instances in which the victors write history that is distinctly at variance with how events actually occurred. There is a lot in here about how change sweeps in and the present is always in the path of a rampaging future, whether one is talking about wilderness being replaced by farming and ranching, working the land being replaced by digging through it, or one population displacing another. Meyer highlights a major theme of the book when the last Comanche chief is found to be carrying a copy of History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.Meyer takes on some regional stereotypes as well. There is a myth about the West, that it was founded and ruled by loners, while the truth is just the opposite; the loner is a mental weakling, and was seen as such, and was treated with suspicion. You did not live long without someone watching your back and there were very few people, white or Indian, who did not see a stranger in the night and invite them to join a campfire. The Teggs-us Rangers of the mid 18th-century would seem to have had a lot more in common with The Dirty Dozen than they might have had with Seal Team Six. It is also clear that there has been little change in the fact that governments often want services but are not always eager to actually pay for them. The corruption of those in power seems constant across the time-scape here. Wandering notions. We are always on the lookout for possible connections to the classics. There are some here but they do not seem central. The Eli of the bible lives to 98 and has a son named Phineas. This one lives to 100 and also has a son named Phineas. One might see in the Comanche raids here a link to the Philistine raids of the earlier time. Also Eli was cursed by God that his male descendants would not see old age. This is not entirely the case here, but the death rate is alarmingly high for this Eli’s progeny through the generations. There is a Ulysses in this story, who, like his namesake, goes on a quest. And Eli is referred to in this way as well, in Peter’s diaries: I began to think how often he was home during my childhood (never), my mother making excuses for him. Did she forgive him that day, at the very end. I do not. She was always reading to us, trying to distract us; she gave us very little time to get bored, or to notice he was gone. Some children’s version of the Odyssey, my father being Odysseus. Him versus the Cyclops, the Lotus Eaters, the Sirens, Everett, being much older, off reading by himself. Later I found his journals, detailed drawings of brown-skinned girls without dresses….My assumption, as my mother told us that my father was like Odysseus, was that I was Telemachus…now it seems more likely I will turn out a Telegonus or some other lost child whose deeds were never recorded. And of course there are other flaws in the story as well.But ultimately, I do not think there is a core classical reflection at work here, just a bit of condiment for the large meal at hand. In an interview with the LA Times, Meyer cites among influences Steinbeck, Joyce, Woolf and Scottish writer James Kelman. I am sure those with a greater familiarity with works by those authors will find many connections in The Son that my limited knowledge prevented me from seeing.The Son is Meyer’s second novel, well, second published novel anyway. He wrote a couple before American Rust was published in 2009. He wrote that while in an MFA program in Austin. He has it in mind that this book, which was initially called American Son would form the second volume of a trilogy. It is even more impressive when one considers that Meyer was born in Baltimore, in a neighborhood known more for John Waters films than Indian wars and oil booms. Family sagas can be fun reads, long, engaging and hopefully educational. They can, of course, be over-long, post too many characters to keep track of and become tedious. Sometimes, though, they exceed all expectations and levitate above the crowd in the genre due to the craft of their creation, the quality of their characters, and the depth of their historical portraits. Some, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth rise to the level of literature. The Son also rises.The trade paperback edition came out on January 28, 2014TV mini-series - April 9. 2017================================EXTRA STUFF 5/21/13 - Rave review from Ron Charles of the Washington Post Author’s pageWiki2010 LA Times interview with Meyer5/29/13Meyer was interviewed yesterday on the WNYC Leonard Lopate program - definitely worth a listen6/20/13 - Janet Maslin's NYTimes review, The Glory and Brutality of a Purebred Texan Clan12/16/13 - The Son was named one of the best fiction books of 2013 by Kirkus4/14/14 - The Son was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer

"Remember that," he sad, "None of it's worth a shit until you put your name on it."-- Philipp Meyer, The Son There are certain rare novels that capture the art, heart, and action of both American fiction and history. 'The Son" is one of those historical novels that can absolutely propel the reader. Its narrative strength, however, is equaled by its detail and its multi-generational epic arc. 'The Son' captures the tension between land and people; the contest between people and people; the struggle between fathers and sons. 'The Son,' is the history of Texas and the West told through three generations of Texans: Eli McCullough (born 1836: the year Texas became a Republic/thesis), his son Peter (born 1870/antithesis) and Peter's granddaughter Jeanne Anne (born 1926/synthesis).This is a novel that is a pure descendant of Melville, Faulkner, Cather and McCarthy (perhaps, not quite up to their snuff, but a valiant effort). These authors set the stage that allowed Meyer to carve his novel out of the rich soil of the Texas and to shoot another Western myth into the the innumerable stars in the sky.

This is a big summer blockbuster of a novel—a huge book that can keep one occupied for days. The world looks a little different after a session with it—we feel wonder and regret in equal shares: wonder at human diversity and commonality evident at the same time; regret at our inability to comprehend this and share our bounty until it is too late.Three generations of Texans represented by Eli, Peter, and Jeanne struggle through Comanche raids and the discovery of oil from the mid-nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Eli is the "son" about whom the others revolve, and his life is the most finely described and keenly felt. But the time and distance we readers enjoy as the generations play out is what brings the book to fruition: life lessons and realizations about the human condition result.Comparisons have been made of Philipp Meyer with Cormac McCarthy and I can see why: the country is that same hard, brutal, violent landscape that McCarthy paints so memorably. Meyer has his own style, however. Sentences are longer and in this novel the timeline is far longer. He shifts point of view and time frequently, and he writes in the voice of a woman—an unusual woman who often thinks like a man, it could be argued—but that is something I don’t recall McCarthy attempting.The threads come together at the end, and we see who sired whom, and which family is still standing. What is remarkable as the story unfolds, is how the large scope of the story smooths out the individual agonies and gives us instead a kind of justice—what we like to call divine justice—but it is really no more than human history to date. If it went on a little longer, perhaps, the wheel would have turned once again. There may be some in the future who have actually learned from our past, but judging from the folks that survive in this book, the hope is a faint one.Jeanne : "But the slackening. By five she and her brothers were throwing loops. By ten she was at the branding fire. Her grandchildren were not good at anything and did not have much interest in anything either. She wondered if the Colonel would even recognize them as his descendants, felt briefly defensive for them, but of course it was true. Something was happening to the human race.That is what all old people think, she decided…When the first men arrived, she told them, there were mammoths, giant buffalo, giant horses, saber-toothed tigers, and giant bears. The American cheetah—the only animal on earth that could outrun a pronghorn antelope.Her grandsons … went inside to watch television." Jeanne: "Of course you wanted your children to have it better than you had. But at what point was it not better at all? People needed something to worry about or they would destroy themselves, and she thought of her grandchildren and all the grandchildren yet to come."Eli: "That I’d done wrong was plain. I was not thick enough to believe I might have saved the ponies from Ranald Mackenzie’s troopers, but you could never say for certain. A single man can make a difference."Eli: "Toshaway had been right: you had to love others more than you loved your own body, otherwise you would be destroyed, whether from the inside or out, it didn’t matter. You could butcher and pillage, but as long as you did it for people you loved, it never mattered…there is a myth about the West, that it was founded and ruled by loners, while the truth is just the opposite; the loner is a mental weakling, and was seen as such, and treated with suspicion. You did not live long without someone watching your back and there were very few people, white or Indian, who did not see a stranger in the night and invite him to join the campfire."Peter: "To listen to the three of them talk about the death of Dutch Hollis, you might have thought there had been some accident, a lightning strike, flash flood, the hand of God. Not my son’s. Had to do it, acted on instinct, the sheriff just nodding away, sipping our whiskey, my father refilling his glass.Considered interrupting them to note that the entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement—from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves."Philipp Meyer is a remarkable writer. You really do not want to miss this big, absorbing saga. Meyer has written another novel, American Rust, which was likewise memorable, about living in the Rust Belt in Pennsylvania. These are, for the most part, books about men. But that is fine—he does this with great skill. I think I will always have Meyer on my list of must-reads.

3.5 stars, rounded upI'm not going to go into the plot of this 4 generation saga since many before me have done a better job than I could hope to do, plus the GR synopsis tells you all you need to know. I listened to the audiobook and Will Patton and Kate Mulgrew were phenomenal. They definitely increased my enjoyment of the story. And what a story it is.After a very strong start, I thought it would easily be a 5 star read, but the middle felt a little bloated and my interest flagged a bit. Not uncommon for a book that is 600 pages long and nearly 18 hours of listening time. I would still highly recommend the book.I'm looking forward to the AMC series starting April 8, starring Pierce Brosnan as Eli McCullough. Eli is definitely the star of the book - but not likable - and it will be interesting to see how Brosnan interprets the character.

Epic, savage, surly, and brimming with ideas, Philipp Meyer's sweeping historical tale of Texas demands shelf space with Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurty. Like his predecessors, Meyer illustrates the ruthless, violent forms of blood-spilling murder it takes to build the future of a land. Death begets life.People are conditioned to believe in their rights of land possession, and history point fingers at those who stole land from those that used to occupy it. Wars are fought over territory, and arguments continue on the authority of the privileged. But, as Meyer blazingly illuminates, the rights of possession were stolen from others, who scalped it from others, who poached it from others..."...he thought only of the Texans who had stolen it from his people. And the Indians from whom his people had stolen it had themselves stolen it from other Indians.""The Americans...They thought that simply because they had stolen something, no one should be allowed to steal it from them."Told from the perspective of three narrators representing three generations of the Texas cattle baron and then oil baron McCullough family, and spanning the 19th-21st century, the tale takes the reader on a ferocious adventure of the birth and expansion of the Texas frontier. The legacies of fathers to sons (and one narrator, a daughter) are tough and soul scorching. The prose is as muscular and sinewy as a prized thoroughbred, the story as pitiless as a rattlesnake in a desert. And yet, there's an undulating tenderness, a tremendous amount of empathy that is elicited from the reader."A man, a life--it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portugese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story...The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were."