The Son

“They could not seem to grasp that what mattered was what you did. Not what you said or thought about.”

A big sprawling novel by Phillip Meyer that is the basis for the AMC series.

Meyer has literary chops. No doubt about it.

Meyer has authenticity—the man spent time learning to bow-hunt, he has eaten raw buffalo liver on the plains and other such “get inside the skin” of the character tactics to bring realness to the novel.

The authenticity and the literary prowess are never in question.

With that said, while I enjoyed this book a good deal, I never quite felt that total immersion as in other sprawling Western sagas. Now, this may be a fault of this particular reader for often when a book doesn’t quite connect it can be that the story does not do what we the reader wants it to do; in those cases it is wise to sit back, and leave the unwritten book in our heads out of the equation and enjoy what is on the actual page.

I enjoyed The Son immensely, but it feels as if it is reaching for classic, and if I value it on that scale it falls a wee bit short.