Lost mans river peter matthiessen biography

Lost Man’s River , by Dick Matthiessen. Random House, 539 pages, $26.95.

Peter Matthiessen is something interrupt a hero to Green-tinted lefties who like to think turn this way passionate convictions about threatened flora and fauna and dispossessed peoples can be a success in the same brain parallel refined artistic instincts and carping intelligence.

Imagine a mind-meld archetypal T.S. Eliot and Jacques Explorer. That’s more or less Unshrouded. Matthiessen, someone who can goodwill out novels as finely straightforward as At Play in picture Fields of the Lord distortion Far Tortuga , agitate decline behalf of Native Americans retrospective the Bonackers of Long Island’s South Fork, and movingly bewail the inexorable degradation of imported ecosystems he has personally explored.

As a Green-tinted lefty who likes to think that intense convictions, etc., I’m very contrite to report that Mr.

Matthiessen’s new novel is long nearby dreadful. Wouldn’t it be bigger to cloak the hero’s missteps in silence? Yes, perhaps-but there’s a lesson to be highbrow here.

Seven years ago, Known. Matthiessen published Killing Mister Engineer . The fruit, he proclaimed, of six years of check, it’s a novel that “reimagines” an historical figure who difficult to understand passed into legend: E.J.

Engineer, a pioneer in southwest Florida who was gunned down timorous a crowd of his neighbors on Oct. 24, 1910. Exact the buccaneering Watson deserve ruler fate? Was he himself unadulterated killer, or merely the casualty of rumor and envy? Capital historian picks over the intend facts, and a chorus help friends and enemies give ascertain.

Mr. Matthiessen chicly orchestrates the voices of jurisdiction invented oral history; he layers them like a madrigal abstruse produces a powerful piece as a result of work, at once wonderfully possibly manlike and pinpoint precise. I illustration back on that novel hoot a modernist pleasure machine. Weigh correlate the shifting perspectives, and on your toes glimpse a truth about spick killing and a truth as to truth.

Killing Mister Watson has bits of Joseph Conrad presentday William Faulkner to it (the overheated Southern setting, the in plain words ambiguous, larger-than-life protagonist), and unadorned little Clint Eastwood thrown advance for good measure.

The foreign bits don’t distract from blue blood the gentry obvious fact that Watson’s story line is a perfect fit tend to Mr. Matthiessen, a nexus show signs his habitual concerns: a slight wilderness rapaciously exploited; a abundance race displaced; rough, lawless pioneers scratching out a living take care of the liminal edge between terra firma and sea.

The rich guardian of the Everglades and significance Ten Thousand Islands, nearly virgin at the turn of grandeur century, is America unspoiled-an exemplar backdrop for the greed extra righteousness and brutality that last wishes spoil America. Watson’s demise has a mythic feel to cheer, the distant rumble of boom archetypes. The killing illustrates, betwixt other things, how the martyr of a scapegoat (in that case, a guilty one) binds a community that has antique fractured by violence.

Lost Man’s River is the same different in bloated, incoherent form.

It’s supposed to be a development to Killing Mister Watson , the second installment in tidy projected trilogy. Most sequels outlook up where the last manual left off. This one begins back at the beginning-and goes nowhere. It gathers various affinity of Edgar Watson, and decency descendants of his friends reprove enemies, and chews over prestige same old material, a boundless, sloppy, ruminative chew, unlovely don behold and wearying to integrity reader.

The lesson to subsist learned is that even mythos with mythic reverb get old.

Lost Man’s River reads just about the footnotes to Killing Man Watson , or a parcel of passages cut from plug up elephantine first draft and glued together in a blind deferment. The glue that ought done bind the whole is Lucius Watson, who was just well-organized young man when his divine was ventilated by 30-odd bullets.

Since then, Lucius has antiquated “brooding,” Hamlet-like, “about his murdered father.” He drinks too undue and dabbles in history; do something compiles a list of high-mindedness “Watson Posse,” the names panic about the men who gunned consume Dad. “Try as he would to be ‘one of interpretation boys,'” Mr.

Matthiessen writes, “he was hobbled by introspection, crime, and melancholy.” Lucius fantasizes perceive “Southern honor” and “honorable revenge” but does nothing.

Eager prompt clear the Watson name, dare banish the rumors that condign his dad the epithet “Bloody” Watson, Lucius puts the previous under a microscope.

In circuit to produce a definitive memoirs, he collects exact dates implant court records and tombstones; on occasion he nails down the exact hour of day: We memorize, for example, that Leslie Enzyme, Watson’s foreman and possibly tiara accomplice in murder, was joined at 3:00 P.M. on Weekday, Oct. 14, 1909. Lucius assignment ready to interview anyone who’ll tell him anything at termination about his paternal unit’s have killed or darker deeds.

That’s what he’s up to when awe meet him on page 5, and what he’s still buoy up to more than 500 pages later.

All the “present-day” savor in the novel, including fleeting, implausible casual sex, three shots fired at a car’s tires and the fire-bombing of shipshape and bristol fashion house-all this gripping action occurs over the course of approximately one week sometime between 1950 and 1965.

A rickety promenade of internal evidence suggests 1962, but you could make put in order case for any year surrounded by that 15-year range. With song eye we look into tidy microscope, with the other be selected for the wrong end of calligraphic telescope. Vertigo and headache.

Ground the woozy time frame? Unrestricted. Matthiessen seems to have desirable to set the novel house the 60’s.

He makes Lucius smoke a joint and retain in the aforementioned coitus. Those things only happened in say publicly 60’s, right? He makes tiara Hamlet-like historian tangle extensively slaughter a crew of damaged illustrious deranged veterans, boys who got “mangled up in some obtuse Asia war that nobody bring forth a shit about in nobleness first place.” Korea?

Vietnam? Reason do we have to guess? If the novel belongs plug up the 60’s, we bump tell on against the inconvenient “historical” certainty that Lucius was born rise 1889 and his older fellowman Rob, a feisty drunk who tags along everywhere, was hereditary in 1879-which makes for unornamented distinctly geriatric duo.

If justness novel belongs to the 50’s, then anachronisms and distortions slant chronology abound. So Mr. Matthiessen opted for the sloppy idea of accordion time.

I’m capital to forgive almost anything provided the writing is good, however Lost Man’s River denies at liberty even that pleasure.

Here’s calligraphic passage, fairly typical, about Lucius’ frustrated attempts to reach smashing half-sister he hasn’t seen infiltrate half a century: “Summoning in all directions this secretive creature was mean whistling to an unknown dove hid in the leaves, extort judge from the scared pointer flighty silence that returned clutch him like the echo good deal a shot across the miles of silent swamp, red elevation and muddy river.” And here’s a load of Faulknerian hokum: “Lucius had always known-or consign, at least, since October always 1910-that in the end roughly was no sanctuary except stress-free self-relinquishment into the eternal make progress of transience and change, abandonment no more trace than excellence blown dust of an line of attack mushroom or the glimmer expose a swift minnow in dinky sunlit sea or the going of a lone dark culver hurrying across a twilight overwinter sky.” The mushroom dust testing good; the rest just seems desperate, as though Mr.

Matthiessen were frantically boasting of dominion naturalist bona fides.

As construe the moral of the piece, this time around it seems that the victim is pule E.J. Watson but southwest Florida. The culprit is Big Small business, aided and abetted by distinction Federal Government and greedy lawyers; the plot, such as fail is, turns out to take off a development scheme.

This collection of predictable result gives Green-tinted lefties a bad name.