Book #145 of 2022:
A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith
This 1984 bestseller about a fictional family’s frontier history is required reading in many Florida schools, which is where I first encountered and absolutely loathed the title. But it has plenty of accolades and its fair share of adherents, and so I’ve always wanted to return and reread it as an adult, to see if my teenage self was perhaps too harsh a critic. Having done so now, I will grudgingly concede that it’s probably not the worst novel I’ve ever read — but it still leaves much to be desired.
I’m not sure of the exact audience, to begin with. There’s a lot to criticize in the flat characters with little interiority, whose dialogue largely consists of declarations of what they’ve just done or are about to do, but that would be more acceptable in a novel for younger readers. (And indeed, I’ve seen people saying they were assigned the book as low as 4th grade, although it was in the 10th grade pre-AP curriculum for me.) At the same time, however, the subject matter seems somewhat inappropriate for small children, with lynchings, racial slurs, underage sex, domestic abuse, and gun violence including the gory shooting deaths of multiple humans, horses, and dogs. Not to mention the hundreds of pages about cattle-herding, which can be tedious at any age! With such conflicting signals, it’s not clear who author Patrick D. Smith ultimately thought he was writing for here.
The social attitudes are possibly worse. This is very much a white man’s story, and while Smith is conscientious to showcase his settler protagonists as inexplicably ‘colorblind’ in their acceptance of other races, they’re completely indifferent to both sides of the dawning Civil War at the start of the text, and never express anything more than mild indignation that their Black and Indian friends are treated differently by the rest of ‘civilized’ society. The minority figures also lean towards cartoonish stereotypes, and the few women in the tale are categorically introduced to fall promptly in love and become devoted helpmeets to the menfolk. Meanwhile, those men are rugged individualists out of the classic libertarian mythos, shunning all community outside of the household and casting all laws and governments as interchangeable intrusions in their lives.
As for the plot: this is a multigenerational saga spanning from 1858 through 1968, following a grandfather, father, and son in turn as they doggedly overcome a variety of setbacks to build their wealth and grow their footprint in the new state by constructing homes, making a living as cowboys, and later tending to a crop of orange groves. The best part of the project, and the reason I’m ranking it as highly as two stars, is the intimate look at Florida’s natural wildlife (and to a lesser extent, a sanitized version of its history). Although the cast is invented, the settings are real, and there’s a frisson of pleasure at seeing familiar place names and plant/animal species in a context like this. On the other hand, the writer’s focus on specific technical details of trade goods and the like is sometimes so intense as to be laughable, as though this were the novelization to an Oregon Trail video game or something.
The structure’s a bit weird, beginning with the youngest scion as an old man, then flashing back two generations for the majority of the work. By the time that original hero takes center stage again, we’re down to the final 10% of the novel, and now skipping years or even decades with every subsequent chapter. As a result, we never really get to know this last MacIvey as well as his forebears, which makes it hard to connect with his end-of-life regrets and chastisement at his fellow developers for letting the ‘old Florida’ slip away. That’s nominally the entire point of the volume, but it doesn’t land — no pun intended — in such a rushed format.
So. Hardly a classic, and yet I can understand why local educators would be drawn to it when teaching about the area, and I suppose its wilderness survival adventures could be exciting in a Swiss Family Robinson sort of way. But I maintain it’s the worst thing I ever had to read in high school, and it had some serious competition on that front.
★★☆☆☆
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