The term shadow cousins refers to family members that are excommunicated, not spoken of and ignored. At least in the parlance of the book; I suppose in real life as well, although I have not heard of it elsewhere. The context is one in which family is otherwise the bindings and basis of one’s entire society - clans of the Hardings or Houses or Daniels, bound together and facing the difficulties of life on the frontier. There is a bit of a moral imprecation here: shadow cousins, bad eggs thrown out of the nest, lacking society, must confront a bleaker reality and in all likelihood become that which they are labeled as. On the other hand, there is for lack of a better phrase deep badness here as well, a reason why shadow cousins are labeled as such. Edgar Bloody Watson, the central character and central shadow cousin whose life the book examines is not vindicated by his traumatic and troubled upbringing or the bad luck he encounters - he is a tough man who makes tough decisions, and at times takes the unflinchingly evil path.

The title Shadow Country is therefore my basis for understanding what Matthiessen is trying to do here. Matthiessen takes on the task of discussing the little-discussed Florida frontier and island country in the early Jim Crow years, a racist impoverished backwater of people just trying to get by. Earnest and honest storytelling of the humanity and the horror will, the title says, be a better way of living than ignoring and forgetting it, will make us a more full people, will expiate some of our sins. An ambitious project, and not entirely unfulfilled. Shadow Country is a gripping tour de force and by its heft I suppose Matthiessen’s magnum opus, a story in three parts of one man’s life and by extension the life of the country.

It does fall short in a few places that I find difficult to place. In one sense it works out to be just another Western, with different trappings suitable to islands in Florida - desperate men in a lawless land. Not to say that that is bad in any way, but there is some conflict between a literary ambition and the tropes navigated in genre fiction. There is assuredly a larger discussion to be had there, but my main point is that there is not much novel or by extension expiatory here.

It is also of its own nature repetitive, three tellings of the same story from different perspective, thesis, antithesis and synthesis. There is probably something novel and interesting there, but the book suffers a bit under its own weight. The sections are not tied together so much as plopped next to each other, 3 novels edited into a single one but also 3 novels that don’t fully justify themselves. I might just be trying to say that it is a pretty long book, and that it is interesting that it was conceived as one, before being written as 3, and then edited down into one at the end.

And then lastly, maybe not a criticism, but I am distracted continuously by the fact that this is the story that Matthiessen wanted to tell? Having only otherwise read his contemplative Snow Leopard on naturalism and hiking in Nepal, knowing he is a white Buddhist from NYC who founded the Paris Review of Books while working for the CIA, I find my interpretation of his intentionality a bit muddied.