Cormac McCarthy is probably my favorite writer–certainly the writer that has influenced my life the most. He put words that I could never write to feelings that I didn’t understand, describing tenderly the dark edges of the world being made and unmade, a witness to violent, disinterested creation.
My childhood best friend and I are in the middle of reading (some re-reading, mostly reading) everything McCarthy wrote, newest-to-first. For all that has been said about the violence and ugliness in his writing, I still think it demonstrates a kind of tragic optimism. So many of his characters–flawed, cruel–can’t help but think that they can fix problems that are (clear to everyone else) completely unfixable. If they were only smart enough. And it almost never works. But for those who come out whole, they do so because they find value in love and in service to those that they love. That rarely makes it any less tragic, but it certainly makes it bearable.
His writing sometimes borders on obstinate, sentences that are long and meandering or short and obtuse. And while that’s an easy facet of his style to focus on (it is certainly the most imitable facet), it doesn’t capture the way his language brings newness to mundane settings. Across the Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian, he probably describes the sun setting and rising and the stars sitting in the sky enough times to fill a book of its own and his description is meaningfully different each time. The night can be cool, but the stars hot, the sun can be red or white or it can look like a cock, sometimes the moonlight is blue, edging the dark with a menacing sheen, and other times it’s bright and its glow welcoming to passengers in the night.
I can’t do justice to an author whose writing has done to me what McCarthy’s has. But I can think fondly of my English teacher, Janna Gard, who let me read Child of God in high school and thank my buddy for reading it again with me in a few weeks.
If you’ve never read any McCarthy, you should. This is dumb (given this post) but try not to read much about his books beforehand. I think a lot of reviews tend to focus on the wrong things–my McCarthy tendencies showing there: If I was just smart enough. But, here are my notes, no order:
The Road and No Country for Old Men are his most popular. No Country has a great film adaptation and The Road has a film adaptation. The Road won a Pulitzer and Oprah really liked it. Both books are really good.
His final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris are probably his most experimental. He does a lot of interesting things with form and genre. For my Tahoe friends, there’s a great passage about drowning oneself in the lake. Highly recommend.
The Border Trilogy is All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. The first two books stand alone and then the third brings them together. Besides The Road, Horses is usually upheld as his most pleasant (read: least violent) book. That’s probably true, but it is more notable for his horse descriptions. I don’t care about horses, but McCarthy got me close. Real horny descriptions of equine anatomy. The Crossing might be my favorite of his novels. It starts out sad and then gets sadder still.
Most people point to Blood Meridian as his most significant work. It and Suttree are a bit more dense than his others. Blood Meridian is written as if it were being dictated by an aging, racist, xenophobic raconteur in the mid nineteenth century–it also has his most despicable characters. Suttree is a lot more meandering. I think more lighthearted, too. Tbh, Kevin and I haven’t gotten to it in the book club yet, but I remember liking it a lot when I read it years ago. But back to Blood Meridian. This is on the first page: “The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.” I’d be fine if that was the final sentence ever written.
Before that you get to his early period: Child of God, Outer Dark, and The Orchard Keeper. These are his most Faulknerian, and also feature his weirdest characters. I haven’t read Orchard Keeper yet, but can speak on the other two. Lots of fraught, immoral, destructive, violent sexual encounters in those two. Side note: Lester Ballard is the main character of Child of God and also the name that I use whenever I have to make a test account for a learning management system at a school I’m working at.
And special mention to the film that he wrote, with Ridley Scott directing: The Counselor. It didn’t do great at the box office, and critics really didn’t like it. But that is only because it is absolutely insane and not very good. Also, I really like it and not a day goes by since watching it that I don’t think about it. I’m of the opinion that The Counselor is the key to understanding everything McCarthy wrote from about 1992-2005. It also has a scene where Cameron Diaz erotically suctions her naked crotch to the windshield of a convertible while Javier Bardem watches from below. And Javier Bardem is dressed like what you might think drug dealers dress like if you’ve only ever heard about drug dealers. Again, this is a recommendation.
“He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (Blood Meridian, 1985).
He is missed.