[Each of the last
few years, I’ve helped kick
off summer with a series on AmericanStudies
Beach Reads. If it ain’t broke and all, so here’s this year’s edition!
Please share your responses and beach read nominees for a weekend post that’ll
put its toes in the sand!]
On the
atmospheric historical thriller that’s also a lot more.
As always I’d
welcome any corrections to this opinion in the comments, but I don’t think
we’ve really had a great cultural representation of the Everglades yet. Such a unique,
evocative American space and landscape, full of prehistoric monsters and
uncharted islands and bizarre
subcultures, and the closet thing I can think of to a work of art that
really engages with that setting in a central way is the film Wild Things (1998;
and I know I’m stretching the phrase “work of art” to the breaking point with
that one, although it is actually a pretty smart, fun thriller). Even the
real-life story of Marjory
Stoneman Douglas, the woman who almost single-handedly helped save and
preserve the Everglades from development and construction in the 1940s and 50s,
would make for a compelling novel or screenplay.
Well, it turns
out that a great historical thriller was indeed written about the ‘Glades a
couple decades ago, and somehow I didn’t hear a thing about it until my
favorite book recommender sent me a copy earlier this year. That novel is Peter
Matthiessen’s Killing Mister Watson (1990), a historical mystery based on a
much-mythologized, almost undocumented figure from the early 20 century and the
many Florida lives, families, and communities impacted by his combination of
entrepeneurship and outlaw tyranny. Much like Attica
Locke’s Black Water Rising,
Mattheissen’s novel weds an impressive historical re-creation (of a far more
distant time and place than Locke’s 1980s Houston) with page-turning mystery
and suspense, making for a pitch-perfect beach read from which you can also
learn a lot about this evocative and again under-represented American place and
world. If it were just all that, it would be plenty for me to recommend it as the
week’s first AmericanStudies Beach Read.
But in his
inventive and compelling use of perspective and narration, Matthiessen adds another
significant layer to his novel. As he moves across the book’s different and
characters and communities, Matthiessen creates their first-person
perspectives, sometimes in narrations to an outside interviewer, sometimes in
written documents, always evoking their individual voices and identities just
as fully as he does either Mister Watson or the Everglades setting. These
first-person voices are interspersed with glimpses into the saga of that
interviewer, investigating Watson and through him exploring these historical
worlds and mysteries as a result. Through this structural and stylistic
inventiveness, Matthiessen has created a novel that truly captures a wide and
deep swath of the identities and communities present in that unique American
space, and one that stands as a great American novel without losing any of that
page-turning, local color appeal. Now that’s a good beach read!
Next Beach Read
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Other Beach
Reads you’d share?
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