The Son
Toward the end of composing American Rust, Meyer realised that he didn't want to repeat himself with his second novel (“I didn’t want to write another novel about the struggling working class,” he recalled). Determined not to repeat himself, Meyer sought to find another subject through which he could explore what he felt was the "creation myth of America."
Meyer's original vision for The Son was quite different from the final novel; the novel Meyer began working on originally featured "six or seven characters”, was "set in the present day", and "was conceived as a book about the rise of a family dynasty and America’s relationship with war and violence." However, after two and a half years working on this version, Meyer realised that "these characters were talking about this legendary guy, and they were commenting on the American myth, in a way. And finally it finally hit me that … I needed the legendary character in the book."
The inspiration for what eventually became Meyer's second published novel grew out of recalling his time studying for his MFA at the University of Texas, during which Meyer became familiar with the so called "Bandit Wars" of 1815-1818, a part of Texas history that Meyer was previously unaware of. Meyer realised there was potential for an interesting novel concerning the Bandit Wars and the "creation myth of Texas" to explore broader historical issues about the development of America as a whole. Subsequently, after American Rust's publication, Meyer began to research Texas history more closely. Meyer has estimated that he read 350 or so books about the history of Texas and diverse topics from captivity narratives to guides on bird tracks in the course of his composition of the novel that eventually would become The Son. Also as part of his research and preparation for the novel, Meyer also went to some extraordinary lengths in order to research and gather historically accurate material for the book. As part of his research, Meyer learned how to tan deer hides, taught himself how to hunt with a bow, spent a month with military contractor Blackwater for firearms training, and shot a Buffalo at a ranch so he could driking its blood to have a reference point for Commanche rituals.
As Meyer describes it, with The Son, he sought to write " a modernist take on the American creation myth. I didn't want the characters to be mythological figures, the way they're presented to us as kids in movies and in some books." The writing process took five years, during which Meyer estimates he discarded or re-drafted many thousands of pages of work, with many passages rewritten 100 times.
During the composition of the novel, Meyer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which funded some of his time composition of the book.
In late 2011, Philipp Meyer's official website announced the forthcoming release of The Son, which was subsequently published in May 2013. The Son was described in advanced press as "an epic of Texas", with the plot concerning "three generations of a Texas family: Eli, his son Pete and Pete’s daughter Jeanne. Each face their own challenges—Comanche raiders, border wars and a changing civilization, respectively." Meyer has described the novel-in-progress as " partly historical novel about the rise of an oil and ranching dynasty in Texas, tracing the family from the earliest days of white settlement, fifty years of open warfare with the Comanches, the end of the frontier and the rise of the cattle industry, and transitioning into the modern (oil) age. The rise of Texas as a power pretty closely parallels America's rise to global power, for obvious reasons. And I wanted to write about the parts of America that are growing, rather than declining."
Meyer has also said that he has conceived The Son to be the second part of a trilogy of novels that began with American Rust, although there has been as yet no information forthcoming about the third part of this trilogy.
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