THE SON by Philipp Meyer

I would classify this book as a western but more in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian than Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.  For me, it lacks heart.  Each chapter is devoted to one of three characters, all in the McCullough family but generations apart.  Eli is the patriarch who lives 100 years, including three years with the Comanches.  After a raiding party murders his mother and siblings, he becomes their captive.  A young member of their band wisely advises him to be less passive, enabling Eli to progress from slave to apprentice, learning to launch arrows from horseback.  His son Peter’s chapters are diary entries in which Peter describes his family’s vengeful assault on a Mexican neighbor’s home—an event which haunts Peter with guilt for the rest of his life.  Peter is the conscience of the family, but the rest of the McCulloughs view him as a pariah.  The third protagonist is Jeannie, Peter’s granddaughter, who transforms the family’s struggling cattle business into an oil empire.   What stands out about this novel is the stark realism.  The author does not pull any punches when describing “how the West was won.”  That victory cost thousands of lives on all sides and decimated countless native American populations.  If the thought of reading about scalping makes you squeamish, skip this book.  However, my favorite passage in the novel is about a different aspect of human behavior that is still true today:  “The poor man prefers to associate, in mind if not in body, with the rich and successful.  He rarely allows himself to consider that his poverty and his neighbor’s riches are inextricably linked….”  It’s baffling to me that people in poverty cozy up to rich people without grasping that those riches are often gained at poor people’s expense.