Roger D. Hodge, a writer and editor with deep Texas roots, now offers an earnest, honest and learned excursion. Freed from his 'spiritual exile' in the faraway land of Brooklyn, Hodge retraces some family footsteps en route to exploring his 'lost Texas landscape' — as well as exploring himself, however cautiously ... As the book's title suggests, this is not a quest for quaint county fairs and colorful local attractions... Hodge is on the prowl for darker, more meaningful, more telling places and people ... This is part elegy, part picaresque, part memoir and part history, all bound together in prose that is by turns lyrical and slashing ... The book calls to mind Ian Frazier's Great Plains, the 1989 melancholy paean to America's wind-blown prairie ... Splendid writers like Hodge, with a sharp sense of history and a loving but unsparing pen, help us understand what we're seeing as we go.
...a fervent pastiche of memory and reportage and history... Hodge begins his book with an atmospheric prelude that to my ear echoes the opening of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian ... If Hodge is susceptible every now and then to the hypnotic Bible rhythms of McCarthy’s language, for the most part he writes with an earnest, stripped-down clarity. He’s smart, observant and skeptical. He has no interest in adding another volume to the library shelves of rousing Texas hoohah ... Hard ground and lived experience are what Texas Blood is all about ... All of this is often riveting, but it can be frustrating too, because Texas Blood is more a box of parts than a smoothly cresting narrative ... His reporting is vigorous ... Best of all, Hodge is haunted. He never gets mystical, but neither is he ever out of touch with the shimmering, mysterious history of the land he’s writing about, or the unfathomable allure it had for ancient peoples and his own pioneer family.
The identity of Texas, and Texans, rests at the center of Hodge’s appealing and unusual new book, Texas Blood ... By writing and reporting Texas Blood, Hodge aims to fix that. His book aspires to the tradition of Joan Didion on California and Ian Frazier on the Great Plains, and it mostly succeeds. Texas comes with a thick overgrowth of symbol and myth: rodeos, oil rigs, the Alamo. Hodge sets it all aside. He’s not interested in chipper 'rise of Texas' histories, nor in odes to the Texan character — two genres favored by writers who, in Hodge’s nice and knifing phrase, play the role of 'professional Texan' ... Hodge’s desire to counter this tradition does wonders for the scope of his book, which toggles between his family and the state’s forgotten history... Hodge writes carefully and elegantly, but sometimes his book bogs down under a mix of meandering prose and maximalist detail; in a few stretches there are so many asides they stop feeling like asides.
The legendary Texas borderland ranch culture is fading, and Hodge takes an unsparing look at how it developed, what it meant and how it’s dying in Texas Blood ... Texas Blood, a title that refers to the blood of Hodge’s ancestors and the blood of Southwestern violence, is a heady, sometimes humorous mélange of family history, memoir, research and travelogue. In the course of the book, Hodge retraces his forebears’ path south from Missouri, drives pretty much the entirety of the Rio Grande Valley, interviews border patrol agents and his grandma, hangs out with Mexican-American pilgrims at the Cristo Rey shrine and explains why Cormac McCarthy’s novels are more realistic than not.
The title, Texas Blood, refers to family, bloodline, Hodge’s ancestors, but also, as the subtitle suggests, the wide-ranging topics covered in this fascinating Texas story ... Hodge does, in fact, return to the state by way of this work of nonfiction. He revisits his roots and tells the wild stories of things he experienced working on a ranch. He contextualizes the experiences by way of the stories of his ancestors in Texas, and also in Oklahoma and Arizona, but the main setting of the book is Texas — big, complex, idiosyncratic Texas ...an example of narrative journalism ... Hodge’s Texas is ominous and bleak. The stories are fascinating and the characters that people an otherwise flat, dusty dimension come alive due to Hodge’s masterful prose ... And it isn’t a quick read, not because it’s long, but because the prose demands a close, deliberate, unhurried pace to absorb quite so many carefully offered details and a extensive cavalcade of memorable characters and events.
Some of Hodge’s explorations are bookish: he’s a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy, wandering around the vicinity of Del Rio contemplating No Country for Old Men and other 'messages from lost worlds, artifacts of vanished histories' ... Hodge’s suggestion that the 'official' history of Texas, whatever that might be, excludes many of its players, from Native Americans to French buccaneers and German freethinkers, isn’t quite accurate; no modern writer on Texas dares overlook them... Still, Hodge does a nice job of relating some of those lesser-known stories ... Of a piece with revisionist Westerns à la Larry McMurtry and Richard White and of much interest to readers along the border.
Hodge, national editor of the Intercept, embarks on a singular journey to rediscover his borderland-Texas roots, telling stories of his adventures as a youthful ranch hand and recollecting memories from his family’s land ... Texas’s complicated, multicultural history becomes part of Hodge’s narrative; ancient pictographs, battles between Comanches and settlers, and the demoralizing effects of the drug war all feature in this heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. Hodge’s casual tone possesses an easy charm, with each anecdote sparking deeper dives into historical and cultural issues that reveal how Texas’s violent past continues to affect its present ... Hodge combines a journalist’s eye with a native son’s love to give readers clear insight into southwestern Texas’s past, present, and future.
