BONE BY BONE
By Peter Matthiessen
With the
publication of Bone by Bone Peter Matthiessen completes an impressive, albeit
inconsistent, trilogy. The first volume, Killing Mr. Watson, made use of
a medley of narrative voices to tell the turn-of-the-century story of the
violent life and death of an Everglades sugar plantation operator named Edgar
Watson. The second installment, Lost Man's River, was a major
disappointment, following the attempt of Watson's son to come to grips with his
father's past. Bone by Bone, the final piece of the historical puzzle
that has obsessed Matthiessen for the last 20 years, is the same story as told
by the enigmatic Mr. Watson himself.
Watson was a real person, and the trilogy is grounded in the few hard facts
that are known about his life. From these simple guideposts Matthiessen has
re-imagined a Watson to be set against the lurid Watson gossip that has evolved
over eight decades into a local myth. The result is a work that explores the
making of an identity, a history, and a nation.
About halfway through the novel, Watson makes a reference to the
"frontier thesis" of historian Frederick Jackson Turner. It was
Turner's belief that the American identity was created out of a response to the
frontier - a challenge that brought forth a separate American character and
distinctly American institutions. But by 1890 the U. S. census had officially
declared the frontier closed, thus bringing America's evolution to a terminus.
By Watson's reckoning this was premature. "The professor who claimed
there was no more frontier had never heard about the Everglades." After
living a semi-outlaw life in the Wild West (there were even rumours that he
killed Belle Starr), Watson comes to the Ten Thousand Islands precisely because
it is "the last American frontier." The Everglades are a lawless,
violent backwater that is also a land of opportunity for those who have the
right stuff.
Matthiessen has always been interested in frontiers, in part because of what
they represent as metaphors. The frontier is that fluid line dividing conscious
and unconscious, advanced and primitive forces. The way they react makes
history.
The frontier is also part of Watson's split personality. On the one hand he
is the progressive, entrepreneurial businessman known to the locals as the
Emperor; on the other he is the savage, hard-drinking murderer "Jack"
(a name he gives himself). And if it is the frontier that defines America, then
Watson's frontier identity is also symbolic - a man, like America, always
starting over from scratch and trying to make himself anew.
The trick to a book like this is to take the raw matter of history and
biography and give it artistic shape and narrative drive. And while Bone by
Bone does have a few slow sections, it makes up for these in the boldness
and size of its conception.
Though not as strong as the first Watson book, Bone by Bone manages to
fulfill all of the promise in Matthiessen's grand design. The writing has a
fullness as lush as the natural world Matthiessen's language draws from, and the
plot is controlled by a master's hand. Matthiessen is one of those odd writers
who are highly regarded but whose career has never seemed to peak - until now.
With its completion, we can see the Watson trilogy as his masterpiece - a large
and unforgettably powerful achievement.
Notes:
Review first published October 2, 1999. It is interesting to compare Watson
to Faulkner's Sutpen. Both are outsiders with mysterious pasts who try to build
a respectable place in their adoptive communities by raising plantations out of
the swamp. In both cases the giant plan fails, and they are destroyed by the
release of forces they have been unable to control.
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