Lost Man's River
Shadow Country Trilogy (2)
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
When his novel Killing Mister Watson was published in 1990, the reviews were extraordinary. It was heralded as "a marvel of invention . . . a virtuoso performance" (The New York Times Book Review) and a "novel [that] stands with the best that our nation has produced as literature" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now Peter Matthiessen brings us the second novel in his Watson trilogy, a project that has been nearly twenty years in the writing. A story of epic scope and ambition, Lost Man's River confronts the primal relationship between a dangerous father and his desperate sons and the ways in which his death has shaped their lives.
Lucius Watson is obsessed with learning the truth about his father. Who was E. J. Watson? Was he a devoted family man, an inspired farmer, a man of progress and vision? Or was he a cold-blooded murderer and amoral opportunist? Were his neighbors driven to kill him out of fear? Or was it envy? And if Watson was a killer, should the neighbors fear the obsessed Lucius when he returns to live among them and ask questions?
The characters in this tale are men and women molded by the harsh elements of the Florida Everglades--an isolated breed, descendants of renegades and pioneers, who have only their grit, instinct, and tradition to wield against the obliterating forces of twentieth-century progress: Speck Daniels, moonshiner and alligator poacher turned gunrunner; Sally Brown, who struggles to escape the racism and shame of her local family; R. B. Collins, known as Chicken, crippled by drink and rage, who is the custodian of Watson secrets; Watson Dyer, the unacknowledged namesake with designs on the remote Watson homestead hidden in the wild rivers; and Henry Short, a black man and unwilling member of the group of armed island men who awaited E. J. Watson in the silent twilight. Only a storyteller of Peter Matthiessen's dazzling artistry could capture the beauty and strangeness of life on this lawless frontier while probing deeply into its underlying tragedy: the brutal destruction of the land in the name of progress, and the racism that infects the heart of New World history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like the barrier islands of southwestern Florida--ravaged by hurricanes, teeming with wildlife and buried secrets--this second volume in Matthiesson's trilogy about the life and death of notorious Florida pioneer and sugar planter E.J. Watson (after 1990's Killing Mr. Watson), will stand as a monument to the brutal and densely layered history of that region. Brilliantly fusing the writer's two vocations--naturalist and novelist--it is at once a thriller in the subtropical gothic tradition, detailing Lucius Watson's quest to understand the circumstances surrounding the death of his Papa, who was gunned down by a posse of neighbors in 1910, when Lucius was 21, and a virtuosic oral history of the event, narrated by Lucius's garrulous neighbors. The narrative opens some four decades after Watson's death, as Lucius, a former commercial fisherman, hunting guide and scholar, living alone in the thick marshlands of Caxambas Creek, is stirred from a drunken sleep by an unexpected night visitor. This is an Indian named Billie Jimmie, who bears an urn that purports to hold the remains of Lucius's lost brother, Rob. He has been dispatched by Collins, aka Chicken, who claims to be Lucius's cousin, and to have information about his Papa, who over the years has become a much-reviled, mythical desperado, known in local legend as "Bloody Watson." The Hamlet-like, perpetually self-doubting Lucius, determined to redeem the memory of his father, at once resumes his efforts to interview the last descendents of the Watson posse. An object of suspicion among his neighbors (who remember that Lucius once compiled a hit list of the men who killed his father), he has since channeled his dreams of vengeance into plans to write a whitewashing biography of the man. Spurred on by Collins, a cantakerous drunk who soon arrives on the scene bearing a closer resemblance to Lucius than one first suspects, and by Watson Dyer, a suspicious Miami lawyer, who is determined to subsidize Lucius's study and to preserve the old Watson estate, Lucius begins trolling for information about his family, which proves as tangled and treacherous as a mangrove swamp. Gradually, a coherent vision of E.J. Watson--the archetypal pioneer, who wrested a massive plantation from the savannah and ruled it with draconian violence--begins to emerge, as does a portrait of the shattered, violence-prone lives of Watson's numerous heirs. As the history of the barrier islands--a harrowing story of ecological and racial depredation--comes into focus, so does Watson's role in the rise of Big Sugar, the industry that has begun draining the Everglades, paving the coastal waterways and banishing the last Indians to reservations. The Faulknerian soliloquies giving voice to much of the novel at first may seem a contrived vehicle for transmitting the plot, but they become by the end a dazzlingly effective testament to both the insidious and the cathartic power of storytelling. Through a miasma of shadows and dopplegangers, slippery nomenclature, rumor and fact, a grand, tragic history of the Watson Clan coalesces, against an indelible vision of Florida's sublime and imperiled Gulf Coast. Maps. Author tour.
