...a novel of Faulknerian power and darkness, one that embraces the American experience from the time of the Civil War to the first years of the Depression … While Shadow Country gradually conveys what is known about Watson from records and reminiscences, Matthiessen imagines conversations and the background for certain characters and encounters, even as he deepens the ambiguities of his increasingly tantalizing story … While Book I draws on the down-home voices of the islanders and Book II uses the prose of a good reporter, Book III is written in a rather formal, old-fashioned style, suitable for the scion of proud, if now indigent, Southern aristocrats … Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature.
Why did Watson’s neighbors conspire to kill him? And which of the many violent deeds attributed to him did he actually commit? These are the questions that drive the narrative, yet they are less compelling than the question of why the white settlers of southern Florida so ruthlessly displaced or slaughtered the native people, abused the descendants of slaves, and exploited nearly to the point of extinction every commercially valuable species, from egrets and alligators to clams … In Matthiessen’s telling, the legend of Edgar J. Watson is the story, in miniature, of the American frontier. As Watson regarded the Everglades and the ‘virgin coast’ of Florida as raw material ‘awaiting man’s dominion,’ so our ancestors looked on this entire continent as ‘a huge wilderness to be tamed and harnessed.’
Shadow Country has three ‘books’ that roughly correspond to the [earlier] separate novels … While providing smooth segues between speakers to form an essentially linear account of Watson’s rise and fall, Matthiessen uses his multiple narrators to create tantalizing ambiguities, not so much about the justice of Watson’s death or even about the facts of his life but about the contradictory attitudes of the poor ‘crackers’ and mixed-bloods who called him ‘Emperor Watson’ … Because Watson narrates right up to the moment of his death and because he reads or refers to poems he was unlikely to have known, this final book feels like a literary contrivance … It’s hard to know if it’s Watson or Matthiessen who makes Watson into a case study of pathology, a victim of child abuse. Either way, it’s a diminishment.
Watson is at once a real man in a rough world and a figure cut from legend (some of which he encouraged). Ultimately, he represents the American conquest of the frontier, which this novel proves once and for all was not a pretty or romantic enterprise or one accompanied by fairness or justice … Such a book requires a vivid and convincing world, and Matthiessen – who knows the truth of place as well as any writer – gives us an effulgent setting here, the edge of edge, the raw and ravishing Everglades deep in Florida as the 19th century turned … Finally now we have these books welded like a bell, and with Watson's song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate. He is a killer, but he has our ear.
Matthiessen deserves credit for decades of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that converted the Watson legend into critically acclaimed literature. But in a state generally ignorant of its past, his fiction stood in for our actual history. Naturally, we assumed the novels belonged to us … Matthiessen permeates the prose with a sense of land, wind, animals, mangroves, shellbanks and water. And his gut-wrenching descriptions of the alligator and plume hunters foretell what would happen to the Everglades … Matthiessen does murder so well, the reader can see the rage in Watson’s feral eyes. Can feel the blade of his razor drawing across the throat … Shadow Country probably works better than the original trilogy. Anyone wanting an explanation for what happened to Florida can now find it in a single novel, a great American novel.
In the true-life story of Watson in the Everglades, Matthiessen saw an allegory about the tensions between the American landscape and the American psyche. His response was to develop a sprawling work of fiction, with Watson figuring as the boisterous but diseased heart of the story … The tale still is presented in three distinct sections, and it both begins and ends with the violent death of Edgar J. Watson. It is not the event itself, but the motivations behind it, that Matthiessen is interested in exploring … Shadow Country is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in creating characters, lyrical in describing landscapes, and resolute in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development of this nation.
Matthiessen did not just paste his original version back together...The rewriting begins in the second paragraph and ranges from micro — a phrase tuned even more finely, a dying man's words cut from two sentences to one — to macro: The second of the book's three portions, corresponding to Lost Man's River, has undergone major changes and been slimmed … Both new readers and fans of the earlier Watson books will find a fresh and fascinating novel … Most of the book is set in frontier Florida, a Florida virtually unimaginable in our air-conditioned, subdivided century…Shadow Country takes us there in unforgettable fashion. Even among a body of work as magnificent as Matthiessen's, this is his great book.
Florida sugarcane farmer and infamous murderer—the latter bit according to legend, of course—Edgar J. Watson is brought to life through marvelous eyewitness accounts and journal entries from friends, family and enemies alike … The final piece is perhaps the best, taking the form of Watson’s chilling memoir recounting his life, from the years of paternal abuse right up until his jaw-dropping perspective on the day of his death.
