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Overview
"Watson's voice is an artistic triumph. . .[Bone by Bone] may well come to be regarded as a classic." --San Francisco Chronicle Book ReviewIn Bone by Bone, Peter Matthiessen speaks in the extraordinary voice of the enigmatic and dangerous E. J. Watson, whom we first saw, obliquely, through the eyes of his early twentieth-century Everglades community in Killing Mister Watson.
This astonishing new novel, calling to account the violence, virulent racism, and destruction of the land that fueled the so-called American Dream, points an accusing finger straight into the burning eyes of Uncle Sam. Here is the bloodied child of the Civil War and Reconstruction who dreams of recovering the family plantation. He becomes the gifted cane planter nearing success on a wilderness river when he gives in fatally to his accumulating demons. Powerfully imagined, prodigiously detailed, Bone by Bone is a literary tour de force as bold and ambitious as Watson himself.
"Like a true tragic figure, [Watson] knows and understands; he does not wriggle to save his own skin," said The New York Times. "This is a work of genuine dignity."
Synopsis
"Watson's voice is an artistic triumph. . .[Bone by Bone] may well come to be regarded as a classic." —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
In Bone by Bone, Peter Matthiessen speaks in the extraordinary voice of the enigmatic and dangerous E. J. Watson, whom we first saw, obliquely, through the eyes of his early twentieth-century Everglades community in Killing Mister Watson.
This astonishing new novel, calling to account the violence, virulent racism, and destruction of the land that fueled the so-called American Dream, points an accusing finger straight into the burning eyes of Uncle Sam. Here is the bloodied child of the Civil War and Reconstruction who dreams of recovering the family plantation. He becomes the gifted cane planter nearing success on a wilderness river when he gives in fatally to his accumulating demons. Powerfully imagined, prodigiously detailed, Bone by Bone is a literary tour de force as bold and ambitious as Watson himself.
"Like a true tragic figure, [Watson] knows and understands; he does not wriggle to save his own skin," said The New York Times. "This is a work of genuine dignity."
Outside Magazine
Bone By Bone is a grand achievement: Matthiessen has created an all-too-human character who struggles mightily with evil, redemption, and haunted regret.
Editorials
Chicago Tribune
The raw power of this novel comes from the life force of Edgar Watson...out of the sinews of Edgar Watson is constructed a real American anti-hero. Finish it.Denver Post
Bone by Bone is Peter Matthiessen's stunning conclusion to the Mister Watson triology. Writing with attention to the details of personalities as well as to an untamed natural backdrop, Matthiessen concludes the body of work with an unexpected show of force...It is a haunting, enveloping work of fiction that breathes with realism. Matthiessen uses a fine brush to create a picture of human struggles against an unforgiving nature in the years leading up to and following the end of the 19th century. A reading of the preceding books in this trilogy can only add to the appreciation of the awesome power of this finale.Outside Magazine
Bone By Bone is a grand achievement: Matthiessen has created an all-too-human character who struggles mightily with evil, redemption, and haunted regret.St. Peterburg Times
Truly an epic: always interesting, sometimes fascinating, occasionally breathtaking...viewed as part of a trilogy or a single volume...and Bone by Bone stands up very well on its own.. this is remarkable work.Sven Birkerts
Here is Watson himself, wielding a powerful and laconically lyrical prose, narrating his life....Like a true tragic figure, he knows and understands; he does not wriggle to save his own skin. This is a work of genuine dignity. Matthiessen has worked with...patient strokes to accomplish the hard thing. He has shown us what happens when the heart's fine fiber gets twisted at the root, what a world of pain springs forth from that damage.—New York Times Book Review
The Wall Street Journal
Bone by Bone has all the lineaments of greatness...there is much to admire and savor here.Library Journal
It's not quite accurate to say that this novel brings Matthiessen's trilogy on E.J. Watson to a satisfying conclusion, not because the novel is not itself splendid but because its events precede those in Killing Mister Waston and Lost Man's River. In the first two books, Watson looms even after death as a tough, violent, larger-than-life figure whose origins and motivations remain enigmatic. Here, Matthiessen goes back to Watson's beginnings as a young boy growing up in a down-on-its-luck Southern family during and after the war, with a vicious father who failed as a soldier but beats his boy senseless and a mother who scorns her ill-bred spouse but won't protect her son. The roots of Watson's violence aren't just familial but societal, however, which is evident in the first pages of the book as the boy observes a murdered runaway slave with a mix of sorrow and cool indifference. Readers can see how the system of slavery cheapened life for everyone it touched, and in the story that follows, the boy's constant betrayal by those around him is neatly balanced by his own implacable savagery. Matthiessen makes you feel, viscerally, how hate begets hate. A rich, provocative novel, sometimes overwritten, but who cares? -- Barbara HoffertEntertainment Weekly
This dense, mesmerizing novel will leaver readers stunned...Ron Charles
...[H]is new novel is a work of art....[It] conveys the kind of Shakespearan insight into human nature that outsrips what nonfiction can do....He's captured the nature of a murderer who fully comprehends the horror and waste of his crimes.— The Christian Science Monitor
Sven Birkerts
Here is Watson himself, wielding a powerful and laconically lyrical prose, narrating his life....Like a true tragic figure, he knows and understands; he does not wriggle to save his own skin. This is a work of genuine dignity. Matthiessen has worked with...patient strokes to accomplish the hard thing. He has shown us what happens when the heart's fine fiber gets twisted at the root, what a world of pain springs forth from that damage.— The New York Times Book Review