The Son is structured as two parallel narratives. In 1849, nebulously teenaged Eli McCullough watches Comanches kill his family in front of him and finds himself a slave to Toshaway, a warrior with some authority in the band. Initially horrified by their savage ways, Eli finds himself becoming more at home with his captors, including the lovely Prairie Flower and the insecure, threatening Charges the Enemy. With first mockery and then affection, he soon comes to be called Pathetic White Boy.

Flash forward to 1915 and Pathetic White Boy, who shares a birthday with the state of Texas, has grown into a powerful and notoriously vicious landowner whose new Comanche nickname would probably be Growls With a Beard. On the surface, Eli’s ranch looks robust, but difficulties finding oil have created an unspoken struggle shared with Eli’s sons Pete — proposed native name “Pouts With Sanctimony” — and Phineas, who could be called “Harbors a Predictable Secret.” Pete is married to Sally, who the Comanche would call “Too Young For This Role,” and they have kids Charles , Jeannie  and mostly forgotten Jonas.

It’s the eve of what historians call the Bandit War and the McCulloughs, who secured their estate at the expense of countless Mexican and Native American lives, could be on the brink of conflict with their neighbor Pedro Garcia and his extended family — including daughter Maria, who once had a thing with Pete.

The straightforward plot of The Son is pretty rudimentary history-as-Shakespearean-tragedy stuff, the kind of material that good writing can elevate.

The Eli-Pete relationship has to be the heart of the story. The themes of children escaping the legacy of their parents and the sad repetition and echoes of history require that.  It’s a history of Texas that’s also a history of marginalization and unexpectedly intersecting power relationships. Different native tribes marginalize each other. Mexicans and Anglos marginalize the native tribes. Anglos marginalize the Mexicans. Wealthy whites marginalize poor whites. Everybody marginalizes women.

The dynamics that I found most involving conversations in which the main purpose was prioritizing prejudices, figuring out whose labels were most damaging, who had the most historical cause to resent or hate the other. You can look at the entire series as an allegory about a wealthy man who, unsatisfied with his reach, eyes greater and greater power by building a consortium of disenfranchised blue-collar citizens and instigating their hatred for a scapegoated group with threats like, “They’re determined to destroy our way of life and their weapon of choice is terror.”