It is Cormac McCarthy’s command of the English language that primarily draws me to his work. McCarthy has a bigger vocabulary than any other author I can think of, and he uses it to perfectly express a dark lyric vision of America and the West. If nothing else, he has written possibly my favorite sentence ever.
“There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamp’s globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady mix of the same forms burnt and lifeless.” - from Suttree
I’ve read all his books. I can’t even say that about Kerouac. McCarthy has published only eight novels. One of them, All the Pretty Horses, was adapted for film.
His oeuvre begins in a surreal, timeless Appalachia with The Orchard Keeper, about the encroachment of the modern on the traditional, amongst other things. Then comes Outer Dark, which features a hillbilly girl wandering the land looking for a child she had by her brother and which he subsequently left for dead in the woods, a band of horsemen reminiscent of the wraiths in Lord of the Rings, and an awful lot of dirt, mud, starvation and night.
After that comes the darkly comedic Child of God about, well, about the trials and tribulations of a necropheliac serial-killer. Suttree was a unique take on the old issue of fathers and sons, set along the muddy, garbage strewn banks of the river in Knoxville.
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West was the one book that I could not complete. It was not only the first of his Westerns, but is possibly the pinnacle of McCarthy’s skill. But, the story, about the horrors committed along the U.S.-Mexico border in the mid-18th century, could not sustain me.
The Border Trilogy, of which All the Pretty Horses was the first, truly redefined the image of the West and I found the three novels to be fascinating portraits of the fall of the frontier around the time of World War II.
That’s it. There’s also a teleplay and a screenplay and a few short stories published way back when, but his work has been in ways as self-sustaining and independent as many of his characters.
Then there’s the matter of his public life. He has none. McCarthy is one of the most reclusive authors alive today. He has given one interview and one interview only up to this point, and by all accounts it was a favor to his longtime editor upon his editor’s retirement. It was given to the New York Times in 1992 and, not surprisingly, he dodges any questions about his novels, his work, or anything aside from the curiousity of life in the West.
I’ve heard stories about when he and his first wife were living in a converted hay loft in the south, nearly starving to death even though he had published a couple of books. The phone would ring and it would be some university offering to pay him a couple thousand dollars to come give an hour long speech. His response was always: “Everything I have to say is on the page.” Click.
Which brings me to my point. (Yes, I have a point.) Not only is his first book in seven years coming out next week, his second interview ever has been published in Vanity Fair. It’s with the same reporter that he did the Times interview with, Richard B. Woodward. Luckily, a certain someone in my household is a subscriber to that magazine. Before I get a chance to read it, all I can supply here is one quote from the interview that I found online.
“Most people don’t ever see anyone die. It used to be if you grew up in a family you saw everybody die. They died in their bed at home with everyone gathered around. Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.”
It’s a good quote because if it is McCarthy’s absolute command of language that draws me in, it is his grisly violence that has confused me at best, driven me away at worst. I have admired him for his talent with the craft, but I go to Kerouac and other writers for ideas that I can better relate to and learn from.
I have enough respect for McCarthy as a writer, both as a crafter of words and of stories, that I’ve always kind of known that his tendency toward violence must be more than simple nihilism or something (a la Chuck Palahniuk), but I’ve never quite know what he was doing. Having read his work, what he says in the above quote seems spot-on, and not just writer mumbo-jumbo trying to justify what he likes to write.
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy’s latest book, comes out Tuesday.
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12 Comments
Hmmm, you’ve made me want to start reading some McCarthy too. Thanks!
TroutGrrrl, I won’t deny that it wasn’t partly my intent to turn a few people on to McCarthy.
The Village Voice has an interesting review of the new novel as well, making some very interesting comparisons to McCarthy’s previous works.
http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0528,browning,65787,10.html
It’s easy to split McCarthy’s work thus far into his Appalachian period and his subsequent Western period. It sounds like No Country might serve as a bridge between the Westerns and… something else. Having not read the book, and not knowing what the 70+ year old McCarthy has planned, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Thanks for the thorough introduction to a new author.
I agree– some times the violence is hard to take. But in The Crossing or All the Pretty Horses, I found the humanity of the likeable characters to make the reading experience wonderful. I hope this new book has enough heart to counterbalance his violence. Oh, btw–I really like your blog! Will be back! –Cam
Forgot to add that according to interview in Vanity Fair, McCarthy has another 3 or 4 novels in different stages of completion.
I’ve heard the same thing from another voracious McCarthy reader. That they could not finish Blood Meridian. You really should. I think Blood Meridian will one day be thought of as the trump card of important American novels. I can open to any page and I often do, the writing is immediately engaging, it is his masterpiece and unfortunately, loosely based on facts and very accurate concerning the violence of the times. The characters are all verifiable parts of our history. The Kid is likely based on General Samuel Chamberlain who wrote a memoir of the account which McCarthy undoubtedly read. If you can endure an hour of CNN covering world affairs, you can read this book and should. We’ve swept this part of our history away. Old Western movies and Lois Lamoir sing the romantic tales of manifest destiny, Mccarthy is setting things straight. It’s his one book which should be violent. There’s allot we need to know about the period. Running into a nomadic tribe of Apaches in the open desert was like running into wood chipper face first. Running into the mercenaries hired to kill those Apaches was worse. Historical research shows that Glanton’s gang kicked into action shortly after Glanton’s wife and child were murdered in Texas by Indians. The Novel is an amazing achievement; the research reading behind it is engrossing.
Camicao and Peter, many thanks for stopping by and lending your thoughts. Camicao, I think I agree with you that in some of McCarthy’s other works, the humanity (or even the humor) of the story does something to balance out the violence.
Peter, having come to McCarthy from my own direction, I think I struggled with Blood Meridian because it wasn’t what I came to McCarthy for, or what I seek out in most of the novels I read. Blood Meridian was the very last of his books that I picked up and, unfortunately, I had preconceived notions of what to expect. Not that I hadn’t enjoyed how each of his novels was surprising and unique, but that there were some basic structural and thematic bits that were not present in Blood Meridian. It seems they were replaced by a book so well-researched that it became something other than a novel. I don’t know. I fully believe that it is a great book. I still remember reading it (I made it about 2/3 of the way through, I think) and copying down whole passages into my journal because they were so fascinating and striking. But yet… I guess I’ve gone to battlefields, historical markers, textbooks, biographies and documentaries for my American history and McCarthy’s attempt to make that history real and just as gruesome as if we were roaming the plains ourselves just didn’t “work” for me well enough to keep me reading.
Thanks again for stopping by and for taking the time to leave your comments.
I’m just read your piece on McCarthy. I agree completely about the shimmering intense poetry of his language. But I must say that I was completely blown away by Blood Meridian. Not because he has himself a tendency toward nihilism. To me, he finds the language, the imagery and the tragedy of action to convey the abiding aspect of darkness, universe-crushing violence and, yes, nihilism, that lives and has lived in most of the human race throughout its history. The Judge in Blood Meridian with his blood lust and broken sexual cravings is an abiding image of that evil within us.
As far as I am concerned, McCarthy has carved a position for himself in literature as absolutely unique as the style of Melville or Kafka.
I appreciate your appreciation very much!!
this is the first time I’ve ever visited one of these literary blog sites and it’s just about the best thing I’ve learned all week, that these places exist.
I have yet to read McCarthy’s newest book but have read around five or six others, including the Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian.
Your comments about Blood Meridian raise some interesting questions concerning landscape, history, and responsibility.
-If McCarthy has decided to focus on a particular place and a particular time (the Mexico/Texas border in the 1850’s) is he then responsible, or perhaps did he feel responsible, for constructing his novel as accurately as possible? Obviously it posits itself as a work of fiction but would a watering down of the violence and atrocity somehow not do justice to his portrayal of these events that do have some degree of factual basis.
-Take William Faulkner, who McCarthy has quite obviously read and derived a good measure of his style from. When he portrays the southern ethos in an outdated, doomed manner in Absalom! Absalom!, is he attempting to somehow lay to rest the demons of the past confronting them head on (much like McCarthy may be doing in Blood Meridian)- basically, can literature be cathartic, can we learn more about our common history, our past errors, by having it shown to us not in some history book but in the fiction of great authors?
Also, the question of genre. By working both within and against the American Western, does McCarthy’s work(most notably Blood Meridian but also The Border Trilogy) reveal that the genre drastically misrepresented the landscape it pretends to depict- the American Frontier? Do we need authors like McCarthy (now I’m getting back to responsibility) to call these things to our attention, to show us how it really was?
Through the Judge,McCarthy also calls to our attention different theoretical ideas concerning history. Where does the judge’s truck with the question of the “witness” come from? Is McCarthy pointing out that the event itself can never stand alone from those who observe and record it, that the medium becomes an integral part of the event itself, bringing with it a whole host of biases that will inevitably warp the version told to those not present? Is history itself less fact than opinion?
Hi,
Just found your blog via a search for the Vanity Fair piece. I happened onto it a few months back in the waiting room of an oil change place and wanted to re-read it, but wound up here. I’d like to recommend to you and anyone the article by Roger D. Hodge in the February 2006 issue of Harper’s. It pretty well slays the objections to No Country For Old Men, which for me is no slim trip, but a book tipping revelation, just as McCarthy’s other books do. The way in which I discovered the Harper’s piece is kind of interesting too. I work at a second-hand bookstore in San Antonio, had a guy come in looking for a copy of No Country - it was pretty clear from the get go he was some sort of serious because he allowed that he’d bought the book when it came out, but put it up and just needed one to read. In the course of our conversation he mentioned that I should check out the Harper’s and gave his phone number so I could call him if a copy of the book came in. And he just gave his name as Hodge. I figure he’s the father or uncle of the Mr. Roger D. If you find the Harper’s, ya’ll can read a bit about them and their multi-generational association with the country in No Country and also possibly get off on the gentle ass kicking that is dealt to some of McCarthy’s critics.
Hills,
Many thanks for the note and the tip. I had not heard about the Harper’s piece and I’m looking forward to reading it. That’s a pretty interesting story about the Hodge fellow coming in.
I haven’t read much criticism of McCarthy, but I’d like to. I’m curious if the piece you mentioned is a response to things like B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto, which I also have not read but which seems like it’d be worthwhile, even if I disagree about the worth of authors like McCarthy.
Anyway, thanks!