Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen
I, for one, am not at all surprised that Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen has won the National Book Award. It is one of the grandest pieces of fiction published in this country in the last decade. Like another book on that short list, Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Country is a true American novel. It centers around the life, death and legacy of Edgar Watson who is the sort of morally compromised pioneer that has no doubt always been at the edge of new frontiers. The novel is at once a detailed portrait of the post-reconstruction South, turning the corner into the twentieth century, and a deep character study of a man of questionable character. It constitutes, in my mind, a clear addition to the American canon and should be on every serious reader’s list.
Shadow Country is really a reworking of three previously published novels by Mathiessen, which themselves were a re-working of one gargantuan novel he began years before. The books are now pared down into this three-part novel which offers a multi-perspectival take, Rashomon-style, on the life of Edgar Watson, portraying him variously as a misunderstood hero and as a bloodthirsty rogue. Book One tells of the circumstances of Watson’s murder–which is implicit in the book’s first few pages–from the perspective of his neighbors living on the southwestern edge of the Florida Everglades. The second book is from the perspective of his son Lucius, who tries to write an “objective” history of his father’s life, all the while dealing with the complications of his legacy. The third and final book is from the perspective of Watson himself, from earliest childhood until the time of his death. Though the book cranks in at over 900 pages, there are no lulls, no time at which I was tempted to set the book aside for a while. The three books make an unassailable whole of an astonishingly consistant quality. I left the book feeling like I knew the land and the people on it, the times and their moral deficiencies, and the flawed nation that was, which grew into the flawed nation that is, the United States.
This book is up there with the greats. It deserves every award they can heap upon it.