Lost Man's River is the
second of a trilogy of novels by Peter
Matthiessen about southwest Florida in the early
part of this century. Matthiessen is clearly
fascinated by the hard-drinking, independent,
violent fishermen, gator hunters and sugar
planters of the time and place. He focuses here
on E.J. Watson, also known as "Bloody" Watson
-- a leading Florida planter reputed to have
committed several murders, who is finally
murdered in turn by a posse of his neighbors'
friends. Like most of the rumors concerning this
legendary figure, the tale is vague and
contradictory, and E.J.'s son Lucius makes it his
life's work to sort out exactly who killed his
father and why.
Lucius, who loved and admired his father, is also
out to prove that E.J. never really did any of the
awful things attributed to him -- although this is a
manifestly untenable position. Still, he goes
around interviewing and reinterviewing those who
knew the guy, and a picture quickly emerges of a
powerful, dynamic, appealing, capricious, brutal
figure -- part man and part legend.
The problem with all this is that the interviews
are so much alike that it's hard for the reader to
share Lucius' level of interest. We get one story
after another of Watson's misdeeds, or of his
charm, or of the early life of his sidekick, Leslie
Cox, and it keeps adding up to the same picture
every time. Furthermore, the interviewees are so
much alike that I gave up trying to keep them
straight. Most of them are related to one another
and to Lucius somehow, but their fascination
with every reclaimed twig of the family tree,
every date of birth and every shadowy
photograph is hard to share. In the author's note,
Matthiessen tells us that the book is based on a
real E.J. Watson who "has been reimagined from
the few hard facts -- census and marriage
records, dates on gravestones, and the like." But
we don't need to participate in every shred of that
historical research with Lucius as a stand-in for
the author. If Matthiessen wants to tell the story
of Watson, let him go ahead and tell it! That
would make a novel I'd be happy to read.
The book does offer a few present-time plots -- a
new romance for Lucius and a rediscovered one;
a reunion with a long lost brother; an unlikely
kidnapping. But even these events feel
mechanical and aren't particularly engaging.
There is, as always with Matthiessen, some
terrific writing, and the evocation of the tangle of
Florida history and myth and swampland can be
potent, but there is only one section of the book
-- a letter to Lucius from his brother Rob --
where event and style and theme come together
in a powerful and seamless bit of narrative. This
letter shows what the novel might have been had
it been conceived not as an intricate, mosaic
meditation on the meaning of legend and history,
but, in keeping with the title, as a strong,
irresistible river of story. -- Salon
A large, vivid, ambitious novel from one of the country's most accomplished American writers, offering a powerful portrait of life among the hunters, renegades, and wanderers infesting the Florida Everglades in the century's early decades.
Matthiessen's (African Silences) latest is in many ways a sequel to his 1990 novel, Killing Mister Watson. In that work, the violent, vigorous figure of Edgar Watson dominated the action. A settler in the still-wild Everglades in the early years of the century, Edgar, with his reputation as a killer, was both respected and feared by his neighbors. Then, in 1910, died during a confrontation with a posse. But who actually fired the fatal shot? Had Edgar fired first? And was he in fact a murderer? His son Lucius, an academic, has tried repeatedly to escape from his father's lengthy shadow. Once again, in the '50s, Lucius is drawn reluctantly back into the struggle to puzzle out what his father was when a cache of documents about him comes to light. In the company of some of his father's cronies and a few of his bitter enemies, all of them old men nursing grudges and powerful recollections of frontier days in the Everglades, Lucius travels ever deeper into the wilderness. Along the way he hears some extraordinary tales about the lives of the local farmers, hunters, smugglers, and moonshiners, assembles a moving portrait of the destruction of the fragile ecosystem of the Everglades, and finally discovers the painful, complex truth about his father's life and death. Lucius' long, complex relationship with his father's memory is brilliantly handled, as is the portrait of the fate of the Everglades, its wildlife, and its tough, idiosyncratic inhabitants. Interweaving a lament for the lost wilderness, a shrewd, persuasive study of character, and a powerful meditation on the sources of American violence, Matthiessen has produced one of the best novels of recent years.