Shadow Country
by Peter Matthiessen
Summary
On an October evening in 1910, in the aftermath of a hurricane, the men of Chokoloskee Island, Florida stand on the shore with their guns and wait for Edgar J. Watson's boat. They kill him the moment he lands, more or less collectively, and the novel's whole vast machinery exists to answer the question that shooting left behind: who was he, and what exactly did the community that killed him believe it was killing?
Matthiessen tells it three times. The first movement gives the neighbours their own voices, a chorus of Ten Thousand Islands squatters, fishermen and wives, each remembering Watson differently, the ambitious sugar planter, the charming neighbour, the man whose field hands kept disappearing at payday, rumour thickening into the legend of Bloody Watson. The second follows his son Lucius, a would be historian who spends his life compiling the truth of his father, interviewing survivors who would rather he stopped, a study in what documentation can and cannot redeem. The third hands the book to Watson himself, from Reconstruction South Carolina boyhood under a brutal father, through frontier Florida, Belle Starr's Oklahoma and back, an American self maker whose energy and violence are the same faculty, narrating right up to the beach.
The Everglades frontier, swamp, plume trade, race law and land hunger, is rendered throughout with a naturalist's precision.
Around nine hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the great dark American epic of the frontier's last corner, one man's biography told as a whole country's indictment.
Historical Context & Significance
Shadow Country won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2008, and the award carried an asterisk that became its distinction: the book is a rewrite. Peter Matthiessen had published the material as a trilogy in the 1990s, Killing Mister Watson and its two successors, after his publisher refused the original single volume; unsatisfied for a decade, he compressed thirteen hundred pages to about nine hundred and called the result the book he had always meant. Giving the prize to a reworking caused genuine argument, and the judges' answer, that this was a new and better work, has generally been sustained by readers.
Edgar Watson was real, killed exactly there in 1910, and the legend was already Florida folklore when Matthiessen found it.
Matthiessen remains the only writer to win National Book Awards in both fiction and nonfiction, the latter for The Snow Leopard; naturalist, Zen priest and Paris Review co founder who later admitted he had invented the magazine as cover for his work as a young CIA agent. He died in 2014, days before his final novel appeared.