So the big men strode the streets, red of face, shirt-sleeved, determined. Their kind had sprung from the Iowa farms, the barren New England fields, from Tennessee. Their ancestors had found the land too big, too lonely, it had filled them with a nameless fear and a sense of apartness, so they set out to conquer it and the people whose land it was. And these, too, they must overcome, and keep conquered, they were a constant menace, they kept surging back to it. All right, let them work for us, let them work for a quarter a day till the work is done, then kick them back across the border where they belong.
Jordan "Bick" Benedict is in charge of Reata Ranch, one of the biggest cattle ranching operations in the entire state of Texas. The ranch spans across millions and millions of acres, surrounding whole towns, and employing thousands, from the skilled vaqueros and ranch hands to the nameless Mexican laborers who live in dirt-poor shacks. It's a big operation in the biggest state, and Bick's dreams are only to make it bigger and better. Into this unique American landscape arrives his new Virginian bride, Leslie, for whom Texas is a strange and foreign country that seems intent on keeping her at arm's length. She reads books, she walks the ranch--a strange concept to those who live there and traverse it on horses or automobiles--but she despairs that she'll ever truly be a "Texian."
Man, I needed a book like this right now. I enjoyed the tricksy experimentalism of Bearheart and Event Factory, but you just kind of skate over the surface of books like those, which are sometimes nothing but surface. I really needed a big, thorough realist book to help distract me from the isolation we're all dealing with at the moment. Giant is a book like that, an exemplar of a certain kind of mid-century social realism with few tricks up its sleeve. But like Texas, Giant's realism is a bigger, more heightened type, and it veers often to a satisfying, soapy melodrama, like an episode of Dallas. This is a book, after all, with a character with the ridiculous name "Jett Rink"--the cantankerous drunken ranch hand who swears one day he'll be a millionaire, and then he'll get revenge on the Benedicts for the way he treated them. (This is the James Dean role from the movie.) It's also a book where Bick's imperious sister Luz is thrown and--spoiler alert--killed by a racehorse brought by Leslie from Virginia named My Mistake. ("How terribly strange and terrible," Leslie thinks, "that it should have been My Mistake.") It can be gloriously silly.
Leslie, Bick, and the other characters of the book never stop talking about Texas. They talk about the Alamo, they talk about Santa Ana, they talk about Bowie, they talk about the Davis Mountains in the west and the Panhandle in the north and the Gulf of Mexico--somehow, Reata seems to touch all of these. Ferber clearly is in love with the bigness and strangeness of Texas as Bick, but Leslie's appearance injects a much-needed cynical eye into the ranch: it's Leslie who insists on visiting the Mexican ranchers' shacks, despite Bick's injunction; it's Leslie who sticks her nose in the shady politics that Bick uses to keep the county commissioners on his side. This is never clearer than when Leslie, visiting Bick's uncle in the "Western" division, discovers a migrant hiding in a shed, fresh from the Rio Grande. Bick's uncle feeds the boy and lets him go, but Bick, he says, would have transported him back over the river himself.
Giant is a book that revels in some of our national myths at the same time that it punctures them. Bick's operation relies not just on the spirit of Texas but the underpaid labor of thousands, and "that's the way it is in Texas" is not enough for Leslie, or for Ferber. National myths, I guess, tend to cover up a lot of hard labor and suffering. Ferber also does a great job of depicting a Texas on the verge of great change: oil has arrived to replace the ranchers, and it's the malicious Jett Rink, of course, who's in position to capitalize. Can Bick survive a changing Texas? Is the idea of Texas--static, bigger than life--a lie worth preserving? Everything's bigger in Texas, but, as Leslie puts it, "what littleness does it hide?"
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