People get sick of hearing the same story over and over again. I assume it’s why healthy couples split off from each other at cocktail parties.
Peter Matthiessen has not only told the story of Edgar Watson at least four times, but his most recent version, a synthesis of three previous Watson novels, earned him a late-in-the-game second National Book Award on top of rapturous praise from new and longtime devotees. My copy of Shadow Country had been published—and purchased—two years ago, but I only just read it because frankly, I was intimidated. It gazed at me somberly from my bookshelf, a two-and-a-half pound brick stuck amongst slender, effervescent paperbacks who had spent summers at the beach and accompanied me on flights to Tokyo, Honolulu, LA. And that cover. Brown-gray congealing into green-gray. A dead-ominous black shoreline slung over a low horizon. Peter Matthiessen may be my personal bodhisattva, but I assumed it was best if I left that one alone.
That is, until I finally started reading it. I never thought I could get so absorbed in a book that gives away the ending in the prologue. The next 900 pages are mixed parts criminal investigation, regional folklore, family saga, gunslinger Western, American settlers history, psychological drama, and paean to Nature. Matthiessen’s ability to inhabit the minds of dozens of unique characters, and quite literally to speak in their voices, so well acquainted me with each that I too felt like a villager among them. How easily I got sucked into small-town politics, and how quick I was to pick sides. I was sympathetic to the hard-working, always down-on-his-luck, and—dare I say it?—misunderstood E.J. Watson. I was also sympathetic to his fearful Florida neighbors, who on a lawless frontier simply wanted to be let alone and live in peace. To engage and invest a reader so deeply in his story is evidence of Matthiessen’s deft and masterful hand—and further proof that this book actually deserves a chance.
So perhaps I wasn’t entirely forthcoming about my initial resistance. Shadow Country is a unique blend of only those subjects that I find dull at best: early industrialization, meaningless crimes, rural Southerners, turn-of-the-century America, semi-tropic weather. No way was this going to be any good, even if it is by Peter Matthiessen (did I mention he is in my pantheon of writing gods?). After I finished the first part, which is Watson’s downfall as told in turn by various Chokoloskee townsfolk, I wondered what Books II and III could possibly add. After I devoured the next 250 pages of Book II within a week, which follows the story of Watson’s son Lucius and his life-long obsession to track down his father’s murderers, I was certain I had heard all of it. It was the feeling I had walking out of The Two Towers: how could part 3 possibly top that? The final installment was, in both cases, indeed the best. We get the entire story of Edgar Watson as told by the man himself, from Carolinian gentry beginnings to self-made businessman to murder suspect and runaway. You so desperately want Watson to get the fresh start that he so desperately needs, but Watson knows in his more lucid moments of liquored haze that the only way for him is down, down, down, straight into Hell. His first-person account finally fills in the few missing scenes from the previous two parts that could either incriminate him for or exonerate him from multiple murders. Mostly, he’s innocent. Or rather, he’s technically innocent. Sometimes. Depending on how you look at it.
Shadow Country is a book fraught with troubling ambiguity, moral and otherwise, the kind that leaves you thinking about specific scenes or characters long after you’ve put it down. (That is to say, the best kind of book.) This early scene told by Watson’s schooner captain and sort-of-stepson, Erskine Thompson, hooked me within the first fifty pages: “Sailing down the coast next day in a fair breeze and the spray flying, Mister Watson’s family all got seasick, and I had to hold Miss Carrie by the belt to keep her from going overboard. Miss Carrie got slapped hard and soaked by a wave that washed up along the hull, but that girl was delighted, she was laughing and her face just sparkled. That was when my heart went out to Carrie Watson and I ain’t so sure I ever got it back.”
Later, Watson is suspected of murdering his farmhands. Watson insists he can catch the real culprit, his deranged overseer Leslie Cox. Sheriff Frank Tippins describes a drunk, possibly honest, definitely dangerous Watson’s unwise approach to trying to clear his name:
I spoke carefully. ‘You’re resisting arrest. You have disarmed and abducted the Lee County sheriff. You want a fair hearing, Mr. Watson, you better stop breaking the law.’ I was talking too much and too fast because he made me nervous…
‘Why would I want those people dead? Hell, they were friends of mine…Sure I have debts. Those lawyers ruined me. But killing off hands on payday—that’s not going to help! I’m a businessman, dammit. I pay my goddamned bills. Ask Storters. Smallwoods.’ In his despair, he seemed to lose his thread. ‘Just deputize me. I’ll take care of Cox.’
‘Deputize a man pointing a gun at me?’ Watson opened his hand, let my cartridges roll across the table, then extended my revolver. He extended it barrel first, pointed straight at me. I pocketed the cartridges, then I took hold of the barrel. For a moment he did not let go. ‘All right, Frank? Yes or no?’
‘If Cox is taken alive, ‘ I said, ‘it becomes your word against his, and his word might get you hung even if you’re innocent. If I deputize you, you can go kill him legally or help him escape.’ Disgusted, he released the revolver. ‘Don’t try reloading.’ He took up his own weapon. I rose carefully to my feet. ‘Mr. Watson, you are under arrest.’ I stuck out my hand to receive his gun. ‘Your clean record in Lee County will help, of course—‘
‘Just shut your stupid mouth, alright?’
Needless to say, Watson walks away from that encounter irritated but unperturbed, while the sheriff nearly soils himself in terror.
Matthiessen’s novel is based on extensive archival research and painstaking historical reconstruction. He provides a detailed map of southern Florida and a Watson family tree at the beginning that I found myself referring back to repeatedly. Matthiessen wants us to believe his retelling—and why wouldn’t we?—but who could have heard and later transcribed, for instance, that conversation between an armed desperado and a nervous sheriff locked together in a boat cabin? Surely the official records don’t provide every detail, so who’s to know what’s the fact and what’s the fiction?
It’s a testament to Matthiessen’s skill that the reader doesn’t care for that kind of distinction. I buy all of it—the rough regional accents, the volatile postbellum race relations, the disturbing frequency of death threats for seemingly minor infractions, the greasy opportunists, the brutish yet fragile and uniquely American machismo, the inviolable proprietary rights to land, women, and wealth. At the end, you realize the book’s considerable bulk was necessary, even welcome. Matthiessen recognizes that history is at its most interesting when at its most inscrutable. Multiple accounts can just as easily obscure as clarify. Lucius Watson’s truth quest of Book II perhaps encapsulates Matthiessen’s and the reader’s journey; it takes a long time (the longest part, though it goes by quickly) and yet proves nothing, only that a man will believe what he wants to believe. Accordingly, by the last chapter of Book III Matthiessen will have resolved all the murder mysteries, but you don’t have to believe any of it.
I do. I was astonished not only by how much I inadvertently learned about frontier Florida, and actually found interesting, but the extent to which I was invested in the fate of a family wholly unrelated to me over an outcome that I already knew. After reading so many books that leave you asking, who cares?, Shadow Country, for whatever you may conclude about Mr. Edgar Watson, will grab you by the belt and have you transfixed if not darkly delighted.
