Book Review: The Son by Philipp Meyer

The Son

Author: Philipp Meyer

Publisher: HarperCollins

Date of Publication: May 28, 2013

Pages: 576 

     This book has received nothing but glowing reviews.  Author Kate Atkinson (Life After Life, Case Histories) went so far as to say “The Son stands fair to hold its own in the canon of Great American Novels. A book that for once really does deserve to be called a masterpiece.”  This is the author’s second novel.  His first, American Rust, won the 2009 “Los Angeles Times” Book Award and was one of “The Washington Post’s” top ten books of that year.  This fellow can write   The Son is a challenging read at 576 pages, but well worth the effort.

     

     This novel is a multi-generational saga of the McCullough family.   It begins with 13 year old Eli McCullough being taken captive by a Comanche raiding party.  He survives only after witnessing the brutal destruction of his family.  Eli eventually is embraced by the Indians and he learns their language, culture and skills.  The descriptions of the Comanche ways of life are riveting as much as they are eye-opening.  Eli returns to “civilization” such as it was and becomes a Texas Ranger, a Confederate Colonel and eventually a land and cattle baron.  His legend both fuels and haunts subsequent generations.  The story unfolds over the decades through Eli’s son and great-granddaughter.  The McCullough family’s story is intertwined with the economics, politics and history of Texas. 

    

     The story is not told in chronological order.  Chapters of each of the main characters are interspersed with each other.  At first I found this distracting and somewhat confusing.  Once I was able to keep all of the characters straight it made each of the stories a bit more compelling.  Each story enlightens the others, subtly revealing motivations, character flaws and cause and effect relationships.  The author’s ability to create unforgettable characters is unparalleled.  His craft in weaving these characters into historical context is brilliant.  The author not only is able to examine history, but also the sociology of the region.  He manages to even make Texas politics somewhat understandable.  In one sequence Jeannie McCullough, the heiress to the family oil and cattle fortune meets Lyndon Johnson, then a young politician running for the State Senate for the first time.  Jeannie gets a quick lesson in the cost of political favor.

     

     The Son is more than a fantastic historical novel.  It has tremendous characters, pulse pounding action sequences, plots which mesmerize and prose which absolutely amazes.  This book, however, is first and foremost about power and, most importantly, land.  The author reminds us that the land was stolen from the Indians who had, in fact, stolen it from other Indians.  Spaniards came and stole it again and finally the whites came and stole it yet again. The topography of the land and harsh extremes of climate shape all of these peoples in one way or another.  The McCullough familial drive for more cattle, more oil, more money and more land becomes a character of its own.  The story of the McCulloughs is really the story of the trap of the American dream: that more is better, that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages.  For the McCulloughs that doesn’t exactly work out.  There is always a price to be paid.

    

     A bit of warning: The Son is not for the squeamish.  The violence in this book is vivid and intricately described.  The rape and murder of Eli’s mother and siblings by the Comanche will at the very least make you uncomfortable.  There are other sequences where the violence also comes fast and furiously.  It is a necessary part of this brutal story but one which may be shocking to many readers.  This is by far the best book I’ve read all year and maybe one of the best ever.   Will it become part of the great American Canon of literature?  Only time will tell.

A Warm November Day

It was a warm Friday afternoon, especially for November, in Washington, D.C.  Our sixth grade class was engaged in copying spelling words or some such busy work.  It was silent in the room except for the hum of the fluorescent lights.  The blinds were drawn to cut the glare from the sunshine.  Many of my classmates had their heads on their desks, fighting sleep.  I couldn’t wait to go home, get rid of my starched white shirt and neck tie and run down to the neighborhood playground and see if anyone was there for a pick-up basketball game.

The principal at my school, St. Ann School in Arlington, Virginia, was Sister Joseph Marie (or “JM” as we called her).  We all lived in mortal fear of her.   We were never summoned to her office because we had done something really good.  She never came to the classroom.   We were all shocked out of our reverie when the door exploded open and JM stormed in like her habit was on fire.  Her face was crimson and her hands were trembling.  She glared at us.  She thrust her hands on her hips to try to calm herself.  She was stooped over and looked suddenly very old.  What in God’s holy name had we done to incur this wrath?

She collected herself finally and in a cracking voice announced: “Your President has been shot and you better pray!”

That was it.  She twirled around and stomped towards the next classroom.  Our homeroom teacher was a younger nun. (Exact nun ages are hard to guess.)  She calmly told us to take out our rosaries and we recited the requisite “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys”.  Lacking any other direction, we lapsed into an even more intense silence.  My eyes focused on dust that was floating in the air and highlighted by the afternoon sun while questions bounced around inside my brain:  “Who? Why? How bad?”  Dismissal time came and we walked silently, singe file, into the coat room.  Contrary to every other day in the coat room, there was no chatter or banter.  I looked at my best friend Danny and our eyes locked.  He then rabbit punched me in the shoulder, wheeled around and returned to his seat.  I grabbed my jacket and lunch box and returned to my seat as well, trying to ignore the throb in my deltoid.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic president.  He was young and therefore in direct contrast to the men he had followed.  He had a beautiful wife and little kids.  He was an idealist.  We all idolized him.  My Republican parents bought a new television (which was extremely out of character) to watch his inauguration.  My older sister had volunteered for his campaign.  JFK was bigger than life.  We felt like we knew him.  We trusted him.  We felt safe with him in the White House.  (It had only been a year since he called the Commie’s bluff in Cuba and made Khrushchev back down, after all.)  He audaciously promised Americans would walk on the moon by the end of the decade and, for some crazy reason, we all believed him. 

I walked briskly home, noticing that there was very little traffic.  The brilliant sunlight brought out the vivid reds and yellows in the crinkly leaves on the sidewalks.  When I got home, the house was empty.  My Mom didn’t work or drive and I don’t really remember where she was.  I had a house key and let myself in.  I ran for the TV in time to see Walter Cronkite take off his clunky black glasses and, fighting back tears, announce that John Kennedy had just died. 

We lived the rest of that day and night in a numb cloud.  My mother came home shortly thereafter and my Dad drove home early from work in downtown D.C.  We hardly spoke.  I don’t remember what we ate for dinner, but being Friday, it was probably frozen Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks. The meal was eaten off of unstable aluminum TV tray tables as we were assaulted with images of a frantic Jackie Kennedy scrambling on the back of the black Lincoln limousine for a fragment of her husband’s skull, a somber Lyndon Johnson taking the Oath of Office on Air Force One and anguished mourners on the streets of cities around the world.  Most of our food went uneaten.

Saturday was an even more spectacular weather day as was Sunday.  We went to Mass which should have helped but didn’t.  Back at home I finally had had enough funereal television viewing and needed to go shoot some baskets, run around the block, do anything but sit stunned in front of the TV.  I stood up in our small family room, stretched, and was about to depart when they announced that Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin, was to be transferred to another jail.  While watching that, a man named Jack Ruby emerged from a cluster of bystanders and fatally shot Oswald at point blank range on live television.  At that point I was sure that the world had gone officially mad.

I had similar feelings over the ensuing years.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and rioters nearly destroyed my city.  Bobby Kennedy was killed while running for President, ending the hope of a quick resolution of the Viet Nam war.  The war itself escalated and too many of my contemporaries were killed or wounded.  Images of dead and maimed teenagers in the jungles of Southeast Asia emanated from the same television screen which had shown me Jackie Kennedy in her pink coat stained with her husband’s blood. The nation was then deceived and nearly destroyed by Richard Nixon and his cronies as the drama painfully unfolded, again, on national television. 

Even the cumulative shock of all of those events pales, however, compared to the warm November day that my president was shot.

Book Review: The Museum of Dr. Moses by Joyce Carol Oates

The Museum of Dr. Moses

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Date of Publication: August 4, 2008

Pages: 240 (Trade Paperback Edition)

     The Museum of Dr. Moses is a collection of ten stories written by Joyce Carol Oates over a number of years and published in various literary and mystery magazines.  They all are very eloquent pieces of writing with superb descriptions and character developments, even within the confines of the genre (short fiction).  Each story contains a macabre character (or two) who carom through the lives of more or less sane folks around them.   I read this book while vacationing at the Outer Banks during the week of Halloween.  The beach was deserted and the northern beaches were dark and quiet.  This was the perfect book to read that week!

     Many of the stories channel the energy and madness of Edgar Allan Poe.  Valentine, July Heat Wave resonates with the horror of The Telltale Heart.  The final story in the collection, The Museum of Dr. Moses is as horrific as any penned by Poe.  There are several stories which study serial killers and their psyche, including Dr. Moses, Hi, Howya' Doin'? and Bad Habits.  

     The author does a masterful job of examining the effects these depraved characters have on their families, co-workers and even innocent strangers.  The best example of this is in Suicide Watch, where a father confronts his imprisoned son who may or may not have killed his own son.  Meeting with his son in a court-mandated psychiatric hospital, the father realizes what his son is capable of:  "There was something wrong with the son's eyes, set deep in their sockets, bloodshot, with a peculiar smudged glare like worn-out Plexiglass."  Another story which hones in on this ripple effect is The Man Who Fought Roland Le Strange.  In this story a boxer loses his big fight which leads to a downward spiral in his personal life.  His best friend sorts through the wreckage of both of their lives. 

     This is a strong collection of stories for which the reader needs to be in the right frame of mind.  Like Poe, Joyce Carol Oates shocks the reader by presenting characters who appear fairly normal on the surface but have a macabre inner core which most never see.  In particular, it's hard to forget Dr. Moses.

Book Review: Indiscretion by Charles Dubow

Indiscretion 

Author: Charles Dubow

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Date of Publication: February 2, 2013

Pages: 388 (NOOK Edition)

     This is a first novel by Charles Dubow, a financial writer and founding editor of Forbes.com and an editor for "Business Week".  This is an ambitious novel, filled with excellent character development and sense of place.  The part of the story which takes place in East Hampton, New York is exceptionally vivid since the author spent a good deal of his youth there.  The scenes in Paris are also particularly good.  

     The story is very shop worn.  A middle aged author, somewhat enthused with himself over recent literary success, succumbs to a young, unattached and (of course) bewitchingly beautiful woman.  The inevitability of the plot is off set by the outstanding character development and also by convincing dialogue.  The author uses a narrator (an East Hampton lawyer, neighbor and childhood friend of the main character) to tell most of the story in the first person.  He shifts to dialogue between the main characters, again from an omniscient narrator's point of view, which is  a bit confusing at times.  The author also adds back story through narrator reminiscences which, while for the most point are illuminating, sometimes are distracting and exacerbate the already slow pace of the story.

     One of the unique aspects of this novel, however, is that (as opposed to A. S. A. Harrison's The Silent Wife)  there is no clear cut villain.  Everyone seems equally innocent (or guilty, depending on your point of view) for the tragedy which unfolds.   Although the plot is tortoise-like, there is a horrific twist at the end and a thoroughly depressing epilogue which underscores the author's point that when trust is broken, everybody loses.

     This is a very worthy first effort for this author and I look forward to future novels from Mr. Dubow.

Book Review: The Silent Wife by A. S. A. Harrison

The Silent Wife

Author: A. S. A. Harrison

Publisher: Viking Penguin

Date of Publication: June 25, 2013

Pages: 336 (NOOK Edition) 

   Reading The Silent Wife is like watching an automobile accident in slow motion and not being able to do anything about it.  It is a slow paced but methodical disassembling of a long term relationship between an otherwise intelligent psychologist and her live in boyfriend, a poorly educated but ambitious and successful real estate developer.  The story is set in Chicago.

    The author tells the story from the perspective of both main characters in alternating chapters.  This is a technique which I usually find distracting and annoying, but this author has used it very cleverly.  She manages to retell certain events from different perspectives but advance the plot at the same time, a fine balance to be sure.  Jodi Brett, the female character is the much more likeable character.  Todd Gilbert, the boyfriend, is a loathsome lecherous liar but somehow the author makes him a sympathetic character as well.  I couldn't help but picture comedian Ron White when envisioning Todd Gilbert.

    The book moves along at a funereal pace at times, but the sense of dread and foreboding is pervasive, keeps your interest piqued and keeps you wanting to keep the pages turning.  There is a superb twist of plot  at the end of the book involving the death of Todd Gilbert which I didn't expect.

    This book has been marketed as this year's Gone Girl but I don't think that is a fair comparison.  First, The Silent Wife is extremely well written.  They are both stories of soured relationships, but this book has much more of a ring of authenticity to it than Gone Girl ever had.  The plot here is not as frenetically paced, but it is so much more convincing and believable.  The characters in The Silent Wife are not nearly so stereotyped as in Gone Girl either.  

     The Silent Wife is a very good book which I enjoyed reading very much.  This was A. S. A. Harrison's first novel after four works of non-fiction.  Unfortunatley she passed away earlier this year.

Book Review: Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Author: Karen Russell

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Date of Publication: February 12, 2013

Pages: 256

      Vampires in the Lemon Grove is an eclectic eight story collection from Karen Russell, author of one previous critically acclaimed collection (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves) and one novel, Swamplandia (neither of which have I read).  These stories were all previously published in literary journals such as “Granta” and “Tin House.”  All eight stories are tremendously creative and inventive.  Sparkling prose is present throughout the entire volume.  I’m not a great fan of fantasy or science fiction (these stories aren’t really either, but there’s probably not a niche for them to be classified in).   However, even if I didn’t particularly care for one of the stories, there were at least several sentences in each which were so wonderful that they made reading the story very worthwhile.
 
     Vampires in the Lemon Grove  is a beautifully told strange tale of an old vampire who has lost his ability to morph into a bat.  He has a human-like relationship with another vampire until he comes out of "retirement".  This is a lyrical story which I guess stands as an allegory for long term love relationships.  A noteworthy snippet:  

"Often I wonder to what extent a mortal's love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I'll never quite understand.  And lately I've been having a terrible thought: Our love affair will end before the world does."  

     Reeling for the Empire is one I didn’t really care for.  It is a futuristic description of Japanese girls taken from their families and fed a moth which essentially turns the girls into silkworms.  I suppose this is a statement of sorts regarding slavery or indentured servitude.  Also, the main character (one of the enslaved girls) regrets her decision to volunteer for this service, making this a story of second guessing life's choices.  Again there are pearls of prose to be savored:   

"Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.  It's become my sanctuary..."

"O even the nausea of regret can be converted to use."

      The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979 reminded me just a little bit of Poe’s The Raven in that a seagull plays a prominent symbolic role much like Poe’s bird.  Russell’s gull is able to bring objects from the future into a nest which the main character uses to shape his actions.  This character at first sees the gull which follows him as his conscience, then as an omen.  Proving Up tells the story of homesteaders in the late 1800s sharing a glass window which is a requirement for transfer of ownership of the land from the government at the time of inspection.  It is one of the longer stories in the collection and seems to change focus from a story of grim pioneer determination to one of survival.  Several great sentences from this story:

"In summer, this room can get as hot as the held breath of the world."

 "My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her."


     The Barn at the End of Our Term was my favorite of the eight stories because of its audacious premise and because it made me laugh.  It is a very imaginative story where half of the horses in a barn are re-incarnated former United States presidents.  They range from Rutherford B. Hayes to Dwight Eisenhower.  One day James Garfield escapes.  Hayes tries to identify his wife Lucy ("The first first lady") in all of the other animals at the farm and he becomes quite enamored with a duck.  A quote from this story:

"The presidents spend a lot of time talking about where the other citizens of the Union might have ended up.  Wilson thinks the suffragettes probably came back as kicky rabbits."

     Dougbert Shackleton's Rules for Antarctic Tailgating is an extremely odd account of "The Food Chain Games" and the dos and don'ts of tailgating in the Antarctic.  This one made me think of The Hunger Games in its imaginative scope, although the thrust of the story is different.  A few gems from this story:

"Antarctic tailgaters know exactly how hard it is to party." 

"If you're a health nut, don't tailgate in the antarctic.  You can always put balsamic vinaigrette on salted meat and sort of pretend it's a salad."

     The New Veterans was another favorite.  The main character is a middle-aged female massage therapist.  She becomes part of a program which treats young Iraqi war veterans.  Her first patient has a huge tattoo on his back depicting a Humvee attack which killed a comrade in arms.  The massage therapist confronts her own survivor guilt issues (her mother died young of cancer) as she helps relieve the soldier's. 

"In truth, Beverly can never quite adjust to her age on the calendar;  most days, she still feels like an old child."

     The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis is a funky take on bullying and its effects on the perpetrators as well as the victims.  It takes a supernatural-Stephen King like twist of plot early on from which it never escapes.  Sparkling writing again is on display here:

"The central acres of Friendship Park were filled with pines and spruce and squirrels that chittered some charming bullshit at you, up on their hind legs begging for a handout.  They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed, innocent look and trheadbare fur of child junies.  Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets tu buy train tickts to the national park an hour north of Anthem's depressed downtown."

"As the son, I got to be on a first-name basis with allo these adult men, all her boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way."

     All in all, this was a very entertaining (albeit somewhat fanciful and at times bizarre) collection.  It is well worth reading if only just to immerse yourself in splendid writing.  I own a copy of Swamplandia, so it may need to be elevated in the “to read” list.

Book Review: Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Night Film

Author: Marisha Pessl

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Date of Publication: August 20, 2013

Pages: 624

     Night Film is about the creepiest book I have read in a long, long time.  I intend that as a high compliment.  It is creepy in a skin crawling, pulse intensifying, maddening and vividly entertaining way.  

     Marisha Pessl has created a character, reclusive horror film director Stanislas Cordova, who rivals Hannibal Lecter in over all trepidation produced.  Magically, Cordova is a character who the reader doesn't meet until the final stages of the story, but his demeanor, his mind control, his steadfast solitary lifestyle and dominance of all whom he meets, his creepiness permeates  every paragraph of this 624 page novel.

   The novel is structured around an investigation of Cordova's daughter Ashley's death, which by all evidence appears to be a straightforward suicide.  The investigation is led by Scott McGrath, an disgraced investigative journalist who has crossed swords with Cordova in the past.  He is joined by an unlikely duo: a runaway teen-aged girl and a bohemian artist/drug dealer. The quest to find the truth regarding the death of Ashley Cordova leads this unlikely partnership on a Heart of Darkness-like quest for truth which is hidden behind decades of secrecy, pseudonyms, black magic, satanic worship and more.

   In addition to the author's obvious paean to Joseph Conrad, she also pays homage to (among others) Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and even Alfred Hitchcock.  This book has been compared to the best of Stephen King, but in my opinion there is a stark difference.  To me, King's books start out with a plausible and enticing premise and then spiral down into a supernatural, unpredictable and horrific resolution.  Ms. Pessl has reversed the sequence.  After you burrow through the macabre, the rituals and black magic, the book resolves in very human and believable way.

   This is a fantastic read and I recommend it highly.  It is well worth the time and effort to read all 624 pages just to read the last chapter which is startlingly intense, provocative and some of the best prose I have ever read.  I now feel the visceral need to read Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Ms. Pessl's (a native of Asheville, North Carolina) first novel.  If it is half as good as Night Film I will be thrilled.