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608 PAGES

BY RACHEL PASTAN | "Lost Man's River" is the second of a trilogy of novels by Peter Matthiessen about southwest Florida in the early part of this century. Matthiessen is clearly fascinated by the hard-drinking, independent, violent fishermen, gator hunters and sugar planters of the time and place. He focuses here on E.J. Watson, also known as "Bloody" Watson -- a leading Florida planter reputed to have committed several murders, who is finally murdered in turn by a posse of his neighbors' friends. Like most of the rumors concerning this legendary figure, the tale is vague and contradictory, and E.J.'s son Lucius makes it his life's work to sort out exactly who killed his father and why.

Lucius, who loved and admired his father, is also out to prove that E.J. never really did any of the awful things attributed to him -- although this is a manifestly untenable position. Still, he goes around interviewing and reinterviewing those who knew the guy, and a picture quickly emerges of a powerful, dynamic, appealing, capricious, brutal figure -- part man and part legend.

The problem with all this is that the interviews are so much alike that it's hard for the reader to share Lucius' level of interest. We get one story after another of Watson's misdeeds, or of his charm, or of the early life of his sidekick, Leslie Cox, and it keeps adding up to the same picture every time. Furthermore, the interviewees are so much alike that I gave up trying to keep them straight. Most of them are related to one another and to Lucius somehow, but their fascination with every reclaimed twig of the family tree, every date of birth and every shadowy photograph is hard to share. In the author's note, Matthiessen tells us that the book is based on a real E.J. Watson who "has been reimagined from the few hard facts -- census and marriage records, dates on gravestones, and the like." But we don't need to participate in every shred of that historical research with Lucius as a stand-in for the author. If Matthiessen wants to tell the story of Watson, let him go ahead and tell it! That would make a novel I'd be happy to read.

The book does offer a few present-time plots -- a new romance for Lucius and a rediscovered one; a reunion with a long lost brother; an unlikely kidnapping. But even these events feel mechanical and aren't particularly engaging. There is, as always with Matthiessen, some terrific writing, and the evocation of the tangle of Florida history and myth and swampland can be potent, but there is only one section of the book -- a letter to Lucius from his brother Rob -- where event and style and theme come together in a powerful and seamless bit of narrative. This letter shows what the novel might have been had it been conceived not as an intricate, mosaic meditation on the meaning of legend and history, but, in keeping with the title, as a strong, irresistible river of story.
SALON | Nov. 11, 1997

Rachel Pastan is a columnist and reviewer who lives in Madison, Wisc. She has recently finished her first novel.