Autumnal Notes from the Porch

The takeaway from this year: I read literature. Just about my entire adult life, the heavy majority of my reading has been non-fiction, particularly focused around the political science and history fields. This was a result of first a budding interest, then a subsequent desire to learn as much as possible a grapple with various concepts and understand the world more. And also maybe contribute to the literature in some way and aid in progressing it.

Outside of the novels I was assigned in high school and the very few I read afterwards I never really had a need or desire to explore literature. No time for it. I figured that I could determine good writing from bad writing through the works I was reading, and that was true to an extent. But for the first time I took an initiative and, in a way, fell into literature, fiction this year. The quality of the prose in a good novel is effortless. (The only two authors with comparable non-fiction prose that I’ve had the pleasure of reading are Ron Chernow and Shelby Foote).

The first day of my IR Theory course in grad school we spent a significant amount of time talking about writing. I remember reading the excerpts that were on the syllabus prior to class wondering if I had the write assignments. Nabokov was the first thing listed. Then I got to class and realized that I wasn’t the only person with that thought. But we quickly discovered the purpose. Our professor noted the general bad quality of prose in IR and stressed the need for quite simply “good writing.”

Well, what’s the best way to improve your writing? To read good writing. I started this blog after being engrossed in Albert Camus’s Algerian Chronicles. I believe my prose has become more fluid by osmosis. I’ve read several novels in translation and still I’m simply amazed by the prose of writers like Camus, Dostoevsky, Varlam Shalamov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

It’s only up from here, I assume anyway. I have an idea for Words from the Ouachita, but there is still work to be done. It’ll open this up a lot. But that’s all for now. Until next time.

A New Great American Novel

The Son by Philipp Meyer definitely lives up to all the praise it has received. I was introduced to the story through the television series, and enjoyed that so much I had to read the book… especially when I realized there were several changes to the story with the TV adaptation.

The simple description of The Son is “a modern western.” That is true, but it’s so much more. Philipp Meyer covers so much ground in under 600 pages — it’s nothing short of remarkable. First, I’ll speak to the structure. The story is told through three characters’ perspectives (up until towards the end when a fourth is brought in). All three characters are part of the same family, but exist in different eras. There is Eli McCullough, his son Peter McCullough, and Eli’s great granddaughter Jeanne Anne McCullough. Eli and Jeanne Anne’s chapters alternate between first and third person narratives, but Peter’s are in the form of a diary (except for the last one). So where we get the stories of Eli and J.A., Pete’s is even more intimate. It makes the reader feel as if Pete’s diary has survived from 1917 to the present day and we’re getting to read these entries in a normal, curious fashion. Despite the rotating chapters, the plot never gets muddled; if anything, it keeps the reader engaged.

Set mostly in south and west Texas, The Son covers a temporal range from the early 19th century up to the 2010s. Eli’s story begins as a boy in the sparsely populated Texas that is captured by the Comanches. He eventually becomes a member of the band and from that point on thinks of himself as a Comanche. We see how violent the life was in the 19th century and how that shapes a man. Eli is the hero of this storyline; he fits in here. He also spends time with the Texas Rangers fighting Native Americans and fights in the Civil War, before becoming a cattlemen. He eventually builds a fortune that secures his family financially for the next few generations.

Eli’s son Peter is the complete opposite of his father. He’s a gentleman who is seeking out a peaceful existence during a time of conflict. He represents a change in society. In the 20th century, some of the deadliest wars occurred, but the frontier in America was coming to a close, with laws finally making their way west. Peter is the personification of this change. While his father, and brother Phineas, are more comfortable using force Peter sees that as something from a bygone era. He’s right for the most part, but there is a conflict between him and his father much like we saw in the world around him, with the Mexican Revolution and World War I taking place in a world where violence was increasingly looked at an an archaic tool. Pete goes on to break with everything he was raised with and forsakes his family in order to live the type of life he believes is right.

Jeannie is the most complicated character of the entire story. She was a child when she knew Eli, so she has an idealized version of him, knowing of his exploits through tales mostly. This causes her to not respect others — especially her father — because they don’t live up to the version of Eli she has created. She also thinks of herself as the closest thing to this idea of Eli so she spends her life in a perpetual loneliness. She is the culmination of the McCullough line. Because of her unrealistic view of her great grandfather, she inadvertently seals the fate of her family. In a way, she represents the confusion caused by the vast changes in the late 20th and 21st centuries. She’s done everything she could to secure her family financially, but she’s lost the soul of the family and can’t see that. She meets a tragic end, not due to violence, but tragic because she could never figure out her own flaws.

Philipp Meyer crafted a candidate for the Great American Novel with The Son. He was able to tell the story of American society through a multigenrational family story. The prose is free flowing and efficient. The structure keeps readers engaged. And the story is just gripping. This should be a must-read for anybody interested in American history, the western genre, historical fiction, and anyone who just enjoys good writing and storytelling.