The Son

Philipp Meyer's The Son was featured in a 2015 "best books our staff read" round-up. The Son was described as an "old-fashioned epic of the American West" that "imagines the rise to power of the McCulloughs, one of Texas’s most dominant oil and ranching families." It sounded a bit too much like Leila Meacham to pass up.

The Son is actually three narratives, told me members of three different generations of the McCullough family, that together create the family's narrative. The most compelling is that of Eli, the patriarch, whose family is murdered and who is himself abducted by Comanche Indians in early adolescence. To say the experience left an impression that remained for the rest of his 100 years is an understatement if ever there was one. This was the formative experience of his life - which says a lot for a many who then rode with the Rangers, served with the Confederates, and basically settled his part of Texas.

His son, Peter, is cut of a different cloth. He is marked much later in life, as an adult, when violence erupts between the Anglos and the Mexicans, pitting neighbor-against-neighbor and, in his case, father-against-son. From the elderly Jeanne Anne, Eli's great-granddaughter, we receive a contemporary account of her family's legacy, and especially the weight she feels to continue building what her forebears began.

By far, the strongest parts of the book are those narrated by Eli, particularly the early chapters with the Comanches. Meyer's description of the tribe being slowly decimated by disease and war are hauntingly beautiful and at the end of the day, it was the Comanches who left the strongest impression of all on me.

I'm not sure I would go so far as to peg this the best book I read all year, but that it is a good book - even a great book - there can be no doubt. This is a portrait of the American West in all of its violent glory. The McCulloughs, all of them, are secondary.