[The Son] allows the past its otherness and its characters the dignity of blundering through the world as it was. These are not heroic transplants from the present, disguised in buckskin and loincloths. They are unrepentant, greedy, often homicidal lost souls, blindly groping their way through the 19th and 20th centuries, from the ordeals of the frontier to the more recent absurdities of celebrity culture … Philipp Meyer has demonstrated that he can write a potboiler of the first rank, aswirl with pulpy pleasures: impossible love affairs, illicit sex, strife between fathers and sons, the unhappiness of the rich, the corruptions of power.
The Son spans 200 years, six generations and a great many eloquently evoked downfalls. It concentrates on one proudly purebred American family, though the delusion of that heritage will die by the end of this story … In some of the best sections of his vivid narrative, Mr. Meyer delineates the process of Eli’s assimilation...The most fascinating of many questions raised by The Son is how Eli, a dauntless little boy, grew from helplessness into absolute power … The reader learns in riveting detail about Eli’s Indian days. They are made that much more approachable by the book’s profanity, which sounds anachronistic but certainly adds colloquial flourish.
What a range Meyer has: He can disembowel a living soldier with just as much color and precision as when he slights a preppy debutante at a sleepover. He shows us Texas evolving from cattle to oil, from hardscrabble grassland to unimaginable opulence … I could no more convey the scope of The Son than I could capture the boundless plains of Texas. With this family that stretches from our war with Mexico to our invasion of Iraq, Meyer has given us an extraordinary orchestration of American history, a testament to the fact that all victors erect their empires on bones bleached by the light of self-righteousness.
… a work of extraordinary narrative power and contrasts, in which destruction seems inevitable and enjoyment of victory's fleeting pleasures bittersweet at best … the power of this remarkable and beautifully wrought novel is that we remember, in its careful dissection of imperial power, our innate potential for moral courage and companionship.
[The Son] includes scandalous interracial affairs, estranged sons, rich people without scruples and, always, someone stealing someone else’s property. Meyer manages to combine ‘sprawling beach read’ (or, as the back cover description puts it, ‘an epic multigenerational saga of power, blood, and the taming of the frontier’) with an incisive history of a complex, distasteful, fascinating Texas … Meyer gives us vivid historical fiction in all its granular detail, making gripping what one would assume boring and doing for, say, Comanche weapons what Melville did for whales.
Meyer’s tale is vast, volcanic, prodigious in violence, intermittently hard to fathom, not infrequently hard to stomach, and difficult to ignore … The novel’s larger-than-life embodiment of this uniquely Texan durability is Eli McCullough (a.k.a. The Colonel), the patriarchal fulcrum in a triad of characters who each provide a bridge into three of the state’s defining influences: the Mexicans, the Indians, and oil … If Meyer is consistently exacting in period voice and minutiae, his protagonists command our attention in varying degrees...Eli ultimately steals this big show.
Philipp Meyer's The Son isn't just one of the most exciting Texas novels in years, it's one of the most solid, unsparing pieces of American historical fiction to come out this century … The novel's structure — with chapters switching back and forth from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s and the 20th century — is unusual, but it's never confusing or jarring. And while a few of the plots take a while to develop, they come together in surprising and rewarding ways by the book's end.
In chronicling the settlement and scourge of the American West, from the Comanche raids of the mid-19th century into the present era, Meyer never falters. The sweeping history of the McCullough dynasty unfolds across generations and through alternating remembrances of three masterfully drawn characters … Like all destined classics, Meyer’s second novel speaks volumes about humanity—our insatiable greed, our inherent frailty, the endless cycle of conquer or be conquered.
A family saga spanning generations that, in its own way, encapsulates the history of the state itself...the book stretches to the present, tracing fault lines and conflicts that never fully get resolved … Meyer has something a little different in mind, which is not to mourn, nor even necessarily to record, the passing of one set of myths into another, so much as to illustrate how, even as their relationship to it develops, the McCulloughs remain defined by their geography … As The Son progresses, we find ourselves drawn most powerfully to that frontier, despite (or because of) the fact that it no longer exists.
With The Son, Meyer grows expansive without becoming windy – this is not what has become commonly referred to in book-review clichés as a saga, one of those fundamentally sentimental stories in which floridly drawn characters love and brawl their way around an author’s research-library historical details. It’s something much sharper, with Meyer’s prose cutting across the page … The Son explores ideas: What it means to be a success in America, and how much ruthlessness is required to achieve that definition; how the legacies of fathers place the burden of history on the shoulders of sons who’d like to shrug them off; how women can find their own kind of power within male structures without losing their souls.
12 pages into The Son, it was clear this was the work of an uncommonly visionary and skillful writer with a superb sense of pacing … The Son is a beautiful, violent and frequently heartbreaking book, but it is not without a sense of fun … Meyer’s Southwest landscape is always fresh and alive on the page, and he is so fluent in the archaic language his characters speak that their dialogue bursts into life like some priceless archival recording. Readers are lucky: they can buy this wonderful novel at any bookstore.
While it was Cormac McCarthy who brutally preached that America was founded in a river of blood, Meyer gets down in the dirt and gore, the rapes and the tortures that fed ‘the tree of liberty’ called the United States … The overarching theme of The Son is loss, from the natural abundance and beauty of the land to the cultures of the American Indians and the descendants of the Spanish conquerors of Mexico, all brutally wiped out by the ‘sons’ of the Lone Star state.
These constantly shifting voices give the book an uneasy, splintered feeling, highlighting the fragmented nature of history rather than its continuities, the jaggedness of each character's identity mirroring that of a state where whites, Native Americans and Mexicans robbed, cheated and slaughtered one another with astonishing regularity for hundreds of years … The success of Meyer's big book lies in its ability to depict its most power-hungry characters as utterly bound by historical circumstance and its least powerful as making small but significant steps toward civilization.
Meyer’s sophomore novel deftly opens with entwined, impending deaths across generations, joining tangled stories over three centuries, the contested line between the U.S. and Mexico, and very different cultures; if sometimes it hints of McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Ferber’s Giant, it more often partakes of the somber, doomed certainty of Faulkner.
