The Son

Philipp Meyer's first novel, American Rust, told an engrossing story of modern America's collapse. His follow-up burrows into the making of that nation with a tale that is bolder and bloodier, darker and deeper. And dazzling. The triumphant result of five years' work, The Son intertwines three stories that trace a Texas dynasty, the McCulloughs. The Son tells so much about our species that at moments I wondered whether I had paid close enough attention for the past 50-plus years. We rape the land, we rape our neighbours. We murder, we torture, we set fire to whatever offends us. None of this is to suggest the novel is unrelenting or preachy, or intended for an audience that craves self-satisfied winks. To the contrary, this is drama of the highest and most accessible order. Perhaps only art is our saving grace, and confessions this beautiful are all we can cite in any appeal for mercy, let alone salvation.

Conrad Walters, The Sydney Morning Herald

One word--stunning.The Son stands fair to hold its own in the canon of Great American Novels. A book that for once really does deserve to be called a masterpiece.

Kate Atkinson

This is a wonderful novel.

Lionel Shriver, Financial Times

Meyer's second novel shares with Giant widescreen gorgeousness and epic duration, but that is all. Instead his account of three generations of the McCullough family, its rise from nothing to great fortune and power across 175 years, is sustained by a savage, eloquent and detailed adherence to the truth of those times. The result is one of the best recent American novels and proof, if it were required, that Meyer's 2009 debut American Rust marked the arrival of a hugely talented author, one whose immaculately rendered realism was bent towards a project of national examination. But bare narrative outline does little to explain the poise and grandeur of The Son. Its success lies partly in the arrangement of these three narratives, so that the distant past and near present bend back to touch one another. A subtle investigation of race, place and ecology is linked to a narrative of tremendous verve and casual brutality, while the novelist's polymorphous imagination inhabits the minds of monsters and moralists, indigenes and moderns with equal convincingness. Texas would seem a big enough canvas to draw on, but here Meyer has written a larger story still. It is a novel that revivifies immemorial questions about our species' fratricidal nature: a story that explores the terrible burden such knowledge brings.

Geordie Williamson, The Australian

The Son delivers mightily. It is a powerful evocation of the founding mythology of America, a blood-soaked two hundred year epic seen through the eyes of three characters who symbolise the brutality and greed that went into the forging of Texas. Lassoing his prose with masterly control, Meyer has a cinematic eye (think There Will be Blood meets The Proposition) and a poet's ear.

Caroline Baum, Booktopia Buzz

Like all destined classics, Meyer's second novel (after American Rust) speaks volumes about humanity - our insatiable greed, our inherent frailty, the endless cycle of conquer or be conquered. So too his characters' successes and failures serve as a constant reminder: "There is nothing we will not have mastered, except, of course, ourselves."

Publishers Weekly, starred review

Spanning nearly two hundred years, Philipp Meyer's The Son is the story of our founding mythology; of the men and women who tore a country from the wilderness and the price paid in blood by subsequent generations of its citizens. An epic in the tradition of Faulkner and Melville, this is the work of a writer at the height of his power.

Kevin Powers

Meyer is an impressive and multi-talented story-teller in the old, good sense -- the kind that makes me hang on for whatever the next chapter will hold.

Richard Ford

The Son is an epic, heroic, hallucinatory work of art in which wry modern tropes and savage Western lore hunt together on an endless prairie. No one, ever, has done a novel like this, but if you took One Hundred Years of Solitude as your mare and Blood Meridian as your stud, then spooked the resulting herd of horses and had the cast of THE WIRE dress as Comanche and ride them hard through the gates of hell, you'd have some kind of idea. This is a horribly tragic, disturbingly comic and fiercely passionate masterpiece of storytelling, bred from painstaking research and magisterial prose and offering up two hundred years of American history in a manner so relentlessly compelling that the reader, in awe, struggles to catch his breath

Chris Cleave

A remarkable, beautifully crafted novel. Meyer tackles large movements of American history and culture yet also delivers page-turning delights of story and character.

Charles Frazier

Rather than an American epic that celebrates the American dream Meyer has written an American epic that confronts America's dark past and roots. The McCullough family use whatever means at their disposal to get what they want but there are consequences down the line. Through the McCullough family Meyer explores not only generational change but economic and social change and how each collides in devastating ways. Not once, not twice but over and over again. In doing so he shows that the wild frontier of Texas in 1850 is not as far removed from 2012 as we would all like to think. It’s time to stop comparing Philipp Meyer to the giants of American literature because with The Son he’s joined them.

Jon Page, Bite The Book

The Son is a true American epic, full of brutal poetry and breathtaking panoramas; it's also a beautiful and moving character study of a Texan family. Cycles of violence link three overlapping storylines, as Meyer's characters repeatedly bear witness to the collision of human greed, savagery, and desire with the mute and indomitable Plains landscape. Meyer is a writer of tremendous talent, compassion and ambition, and The Son is a staggering achievement.

Karen Russell

Philipp Meyer redrafts humanity’s oldest questions and deepest obsessions into something so raw and dazzling and brutal and real, The Son should come with its own soundtrack.

TEA OBREHT

Three narrative threads, taking place over a span of nearly two centuries, set the scene for The Son, a novel that is an epic in the truest sense of the word: massive in scope, replete with transformations in fortune and fate, and drenched in the blood of war. While the focus is on a single family, Philipp Meyer uses these interlinked life stories to tell, in microcosm, the much larger story of the founding of Texas. The moral complexity at the core of the novel is laid bare, raises ever more complicated dilemmas, with each successive page. Lush with historical details, The Son is a vivid, evocation of time, place ... and the violence that lies at the heart of both the destruction and emergence of societies throughout history.

Ilana Teitelbaum, Huff Post

A vivid, unflinching look at the peoples who struggled to conquer Texas, and one another. For all its delving into human relationships, this is a book that aspires to take us higher, to reveal more. Imagine an aerial view of Texas, in which hidden elements of a huge, breathtaking landscape are suddenly made clear.

Jaime Deblanc-Knowles, The Austin Chronicle

Treading on similar ground to James Michener, Larry McMurtry, and Cormac McCarthy, Meyer brings the bloody, racially fraught history of Texas to life. Call it a family saga or an epic, this novel is a violent and harrowing read.

Library Journal

Meyer’s massive Texas saga is perhaps the best Indian captive story ever written. . . [Meyer’s] tale is best compared to Giant. Little Big Man and Lonesome Dovealso come to mind.

Booklist

The overarching theme of The Son is loss, from the natural abundance and beauty of the land to the cultures of the American Indians and the descendants of the Spanish conquerors of Mexico, all brutally wiped out by the “sons” of the Lone Star state. It’s a too-familiar — and depressing — tale that finds a fresh interpretation from the pen of Philipp Meyer.

Bob Hoover, StarTribune

There is an extravagant quantity of birth, death and bitter passion in Philipp Meyer’s grand and engrossing Texas saga, The Son.

Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

What a pleasure it is now to see Meyer confirm all that initial enthusiasm with a second book that’s even more ambitious, even more deeply rooted in our troublesome economic and cultural history. With its vast scope — stretching from pre-Civil War cowboys to post-9/11 immigrants — The Son makes a viable claim to be a Great American Novel of the sort John Dos Passos and Frank Norris once produced. Here is the tale of the United States written in blood across the Texas plains, a 200-year cycle of theft and murder that shreds any golden myths of civilized development.

Ron Charles, The Washington Post

This is just the kind of novel that is described as epic and sweeping, and it is both, but it also has a subtle moral core that will get you thinking.

Leila McKinnon, Australian Womens Weekly

A book at once aware of the anti-romantic tradition set in place by those earlier novels, and confident enough to fracture it. The Son explores ideas: What it means to be a success in America, and how much ruthlessness is required to achieve that definition; how the legacies of fathers place the burden of history on the shoulders of sons who’d like to shrug them off; how women can find their own kind of power within male structures without losing their souls. At the same time, The Son is tremendously exciting. It is packed not only with thrilling escapes and rescues, daring love affairs, and comic moments that slide without warning into chilling horrors, but also with vivid descriptions of how to survive under the constant threat of death, as well as the steady encroachment of corrupting modernity.

Ken Tucker, The Daily Beast

As bold, ambitious and brutal as its subject: the rise of Texas as seen through the tortured history of one family. Four stars out of four.

USA Today

This profound saga, told with heart-warming integrity and heart-rending reality, is smart, sumptuous and utterly absorbing. From the Comanche raids in the 1800s, to World War I, and the 20th-century oil boom, history comes alive through the McCulloughs’ story and it’s this multi-faceted perspective that makesThe Sona wonderful, literary, western, masterpiece.

Stephen Davenport, InDaily News

While Philipp Meyer’s 2009 debut, American Rust, gained significant critical plaudits, it is already being outstripped by acclaim for his new novel, a pulverising epic of the American West. Its viscerality and boundless capacity for storytelling puts it on a par with that classic of the genre, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Meyer, crucially, avoids passing absolute judgment about any one side. Nobody emerges in triumph – the brutalisation, even sadism, facilitates a grim, frequently temporary survival. In Eli, Meyer has created a picaresque anti-hero of crackling ambition and unspoken losses. He remains the bedrock of this work, right up to its eerie, heart-stopping finish.

Catherine Taylor, The Telegraph (UK)