Any Cormac McCarthy fans here ?

[bemildred]

19. A short disquisition on Cormac McCarthy and his work:

McCarthy rarely gives interviews, and is not forthcoming when he does, so I make no claim to represent his views, I'm just describing how his works of fiction look to me in retrospect, nor do I know anything about his plays. It is my impression that he wants his work to stand on its own, and that suits me as well.

His first two novels (Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark) seemed like "practice" to me, early efforts which have sections of scintillating prose, but do not quite hang together as stories, one finishes then not quite sure about "the point".

With "Child of God" he seems to find his subject and his voice. I don't know how to characterize his subject matter, he reminds me of Harry Crews, who also liked to examine what is in the "Outer Dark"; but from there on out, his novels hang together as stories. What he says:

McCarthy now lives in the Tesuque, New Mexico, area, north of Santa Fe, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. He guards his privacy. In one of his few interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy reveals that he is not a fan of authors who do not "deal with issues of life and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understand them," he said. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

I am confident that the feeling is mutual.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy

From that point on I see two threads in his work: the hopeful and the bleak. Generally the bleak wins out, the difference is whether the hopeful gets a hearing or not.

The "hopeful" thread:

Suttree (1979) ISBN 0-679-73632-8 - a fine read. I would call it his most personal work, and one of the most straightforward.

Border Trilogy:
-- All the Pretty Horses (1992) ISBN 0-679-74439-8
-- The Crossing (1994) ISBN 0-679-76084-9
-- Cities of the Plain (1998) ISBN 0-679-74719-2

Lyrical in places, very bleak in places. Something of a Rorschach Test which you prefer, I still like "The Crossing" best, which starts out lyrical and gets pretty bleak as it goes along. "All the Pretty Horses" has a "happy" ending (John Grady Cole escapes), "Cities of the Plain" does not (John Grady Cole dies). The title "Cities of the Plain" echoes the title of one of the Proust's volumes in English translation, an allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah, and I think that is not an accident, which is interesting given McCarthy's stated opinion of Proust.

The Road (2006) ISBN 0-307-38789-5 - I call this hopeful, because it argues for the value of the human project, even in the most dystopian of worlds: "we carry the fire"; and the kid finds the means to carry on at the end when his father dies.

The "bleak" thread:

Child of God (1973) ISBN 0-679-72874-0:
-- "One of the novel's main themes is sexual deviancy, specifically necrophilia and pedophilia." and " "The author said in an interview that the character Ballard is based on an unnamed historical figure."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_of_God

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) ISBN 0-679-72875-9:

In the entire range of American literature, only Moby-Dick bears comparison to Blood Meridian. Both are epic in scope, cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness. Both manifest a sublime visionary power that is matched only by still more ferocious irony. Both savagely explode the American dream of manifest destiny, of racial domination and endless imperial expansion. But if anything, McCarthy writes with a yet more terrible clarity than does Melville.
—Steven Shaviro, "A Reading of Blood Meridian"

It is generally accepted that McCarthy was scrupulous in basing events in this quite fantastical novel on historical sources, and the parallels with Moby Dick are obvious. Very violent. Sometimes (like Moby Dick) a bit of a slog. It is interesting to me that Suttree, Blood Meridian, and the Border Trilogy occur in that order following Child Of God, as they also seem to me the most ambitious of his works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian

No Country for Old Men (2005) ISBN 0-375-70667-4
-- Bleak all the way, only the sheriff survives, everybody else dies, even Chigurh is left in an ambiguous state. A meditation on the state of America in the 21st century.