Extraordinary narrative power … Philipp Meyer. Photograph: Elizabeth Lippman
In his 2001 memoir, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry offers a succinct, yet highly poignant, account of the inherent tragedy of Texan culture, culminating in the observation that "the first explorers, marvelling at the glories of the west, began to destroy those glories as soon as they got across the Mississippi". Such destruction is by no means confined to the Lone Star State, of course, but in Texas it is magnified by the sheer scale of the misadventure, and an underlying sense of futility that comes when we think of how much was squandered for the profit of the most corrupt.
In the first few pages of The Son, Philipp Meyer's followup to the highly praised American Rust, a 100-year-old man called Eli McCullough describes the Texas he knew, before its glories were trampled: "the land and all the animals who lived upon it were fat and slick. Grass up to the chest, the soil deep and black in the bottoms and even the steepest hillsides overrun with wildflowers … the country was rich with life the way it is rotten with people today." Eli had come to Texas as the child of pioneer settlers, but was abducted by Comanche warriors, with whom he lived for some years before returning to the white world to build a cattle and oil empire by the usual methods of armed landgrab and state-sanctioned illegality favoured by empire-builders everywhere. The rise and fall of that empire, and the moral and psychological costs its maintenance imposes on five subsequent generations of McCulloughs, is the subject of The Son, a work of extraordinary narrative power and contrasts, in which destruction seems inevitable and enjoyment of victory's fleeting pleasures bittersweet at best. As Eli remarks to his son, Peter, a decent man struggling with the morality of power, "that is the story of the human race. Soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns. It is all we know how to do."
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