Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

"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. This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race, history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Little wonder, too, that parts of the story of E.J. Watson call up comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, inevitably, Faulkner. In every way, Shadow Country is a bravura performance, at once history, fiction, and myth — as well as the capstone to the career of one of the most admired and admirable writers of our time." The New York Review of Books

NYT review:Shadow Country - Peter Matthiessen - Book Review - New York Times
LA Times review:'Shadow Country' by Peter Matthiessen - latimes.com

My review:

Shadow Country (Modern Library Paperbacks) by Peter Matthiessen

An American Epic of a Brutal Man and Place, December 30, 2009 Shadow Country is Peter Matthiessen's reworked rendering of his earlier trilogy of historical fiction relating the life of the brutal Florida pioneer Edgar J. Watson. (This version still consists of three "books" and runs to almost 900 pages. I did not read the earlier version and so cannot offer comparisons between the two.) Shadow Country is almost entirely set in the 1890's and early 1900's in a frontier region not widely known - the Ten Thousand Islands of south Gulf Coast Florida (the Everglades area). The area was absurdly remote at the time and presented such daunting challenges and dangers to any settlers that it was in fact nearly unsettled. And nearly all who did settle there were running or hiding from something, such as the law or deserted family members. Or they were just deeply anti-social. Aside from its remoteness, the area had almost nothing to recommend itself (I usually the qualified `almost nothing' in the vent that I think of some redeeming feature). It is brutally hot and humid, resistant to agriculture, possessed of dangerous animals (on sea and land), prone to calamitous storms, infested with mosquitoes, and inhabited by a large proportion of suddenly violent men as well as sociopathic criminals. This is the place Edgar J. Watson chooses to live. Within the first ten pages of Book One, the reader confronts this sentence: "Oh Lord God," she cries. "They are killing Mr. Watson!" (Killing off the main character in the opening pages of a 900-page work of fiction proves Matthiessen is either brave or foolish.) The story is told with a dozen different narrators recalling Watson's arrival and life in the islands. Matthiessen's remarkable ability to produce so many distinctive voices makes this book incredibly readable. These people can all tell a story (they are in good practice life on the islands providing so much idle time). Matthiessen does not, however, make them all tell the same story; differences of viewpoint produce a fascinating ambiguity. That Watson is an exceptional man is undoubted. Beginning with nothing, he manages to set himself up as a power to be reckoned with. He is also grandiose, violent, and merciless. But is he a murderer (several times over)? Opinions vary. He drinks too much. He loses what he has and what he wants and what he values. It is a hard life in a hard place. Edgar Watson was a hard man in dire need of some education and civilization, neither of which could be found in any quantity in the islands. Book Two traces the story of Lucius Watson's "obsessive quest for the truth about his father" (NYT Review). It is the 1920's and Lucius is writing a history of his father's life (he has a doctorate in history), traveling to courthouse archives and interviewing long-forgotten family members. But he also has "the list" of the armed men who gunned down the elder Watson. The list naturally makes people nervous and some of them are quite dangerous. Book Two reveals some fascinating history, including the mostly unsavory operation of the law in south Florida, such as sheriff's renting the labor of black inmates to business interests (and pocketing much of the money). For more on that practice see Douglas Blackmon's stunning new history Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Book Three presents Edgar himself as the narrator of his life story from a child in South Carolina to various stopping places in Florida, Arkansas, and finally the Thousand Islands. The brutality of his childhood, the ready violence of white men toward blacks and of his own father toward him, makes Edgar's later actions more understandable person, if not justified. He develops a rigid personal code that demands recompense in full for any slight. He attempts a justification that reveals some complexity and contradictions, but falls short of the mark. Shadow Country is an American epic of a mysterious historical character (yes, Edgar Watson really lived and died in the islands). The writing is at times exquisite. The story it tells is often brutal or just about plain hard life. The writing is compelling, the reading can be draining.