Lost Man's Tale

By John Skow

To emphasize a point under discussion, E.J. Watson once shot the mustache off a man named Brewer. So testifies writer Peter Matthiessen in Killing Mister Watson, the first of three dense, fascinating novels centering on a turn-of-the-century Florida cane planter, brawler and gunman who was shot to death in 1910 by a posse of townsmen.

The posse's makeup appears to have shifted over the years, with some members denying knowledge and some non-participants pinning ribbons of legend to their chest and claiming to have been among the shooters. Beyond these scraps of fact, clear sightings of old E.J. were brief. Was he an energetic, public-spirited farmer or a murderous thug who killed his field hands rather than pay them at the end of a season? Or was he both?

Watson himself does not speak in the first two novels (the second is Lost Man's River), which are told as conflicting reports by townspeople. Thus the concluding novel, Bone by Bone (Random House; 410 pages; $26.95), which is Watson's own first-person account, appears after 900 pages of teasing preamble. Because the author has advertised his main character as a monstrous enigma, he must now provide the monster. But Watson's villainy doesn't reach heroic stature. He is a likable bully and a good shot. Most notably, he is a brutal drunk. "When I give in to that urge to drink and stir up trouble," he admits, "there comes an even stronger urge to become drunker and behave still worse."

This home truth explains a great deal that seems merely shabby, not monstrous, and not puzzling enough to require three wagonloads of explication. The author may have been right, incidentally, not to present this rough man's thoughts in rough dialect. For long paragraphs, however, the words that come out of Watson's mouth are, somewhat jarringly, the worthy, scholarly, perceptive, always interesting, late 20th century observations of Peter Matthiessen. About his quirky trilogy a reader might conclude: brilliant, obsessive, panoramic--and two novels too many.

--By John Skow