As a younger man, I was of the opinion that all the greatest writers were dead and that we possessed, as a people, the best books of English literature that would ever be written. It was an ignorant belief, born of limited exposure, but a fair opinion nonetheless, more because our society doesn’t elevate authors or celebrate books the way we used to. Gone were Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Joyce, Woolf, Dickens, and all the other authors whose books I could find for $1.50 at the local thrift store and library sale.
Then, I came across Cormac McCarthy.
In the pursuit of reading the “Great American Novels,” I read Blood Meridian. Never had I encountered a book with such thrilling language and thrilling violence.
As luck would have it, BYU was home to one of the world’s preeminent McCarthy scholars, and during my final semester, I took a seminar on McCarthy from Dr. Phil Snyder. His class guided us through two of McCarthy’s Appalachia novels (The Orchard Keeper and Child of God), two of his Southwest novels (Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses), and finally, what was at the time, McCarthy’s two most recent novels (No Country for Old Men and The Road). After I graduated, I spent the rest of the year reading the other novels the class didn’t cover including Outer Dark, Suttree, The Crossing, and City of the Plains as well as some of his plays.
Dr. Snyder clued us into a rumor that McCarthy was working on a new novel set in New Orleans. We’d only have to wait three more years until 2022 (though there was a 16-year gap in total between books) and to everyone’s surprise, McCarthy released not one but two books, companion novels to be exact. These were likely to be his last works, and sure enough, just a few weeks ago, Cormac McCarthy passed away.
While it’s not a tragedy—the man was a month shy of 90—it is a loss.
McCarthy’s death produced a slate of remarkable remembrances from the literary community, some focused on his reclusiveness, others on his writing style, and more still on the violence that laced throughout his entire oeuvre. I’ve read a dozen of them in the last few weeks.
Common to them all this opinion that I wholeheartedly endorse: we’ve lost one of the most significant novelists of our time, perhaps our planet, and we’re unlikely to find a replacement any time soon.
This is, in essence, what McCarthy represented to me. That great literature was not a thing of the past, but here, now, and as vibrant as before. And though I’ve come to find other authors producing what I think will become contemporary classics (Marilynne Robinson and Donna Tartt come to mind), none quite reach the stature of McCarthy.
Cormac was both timeless and a man out of his time. The most apt comparisons to McCarthy are men of older generations—Faulkner, Hemmingway, and Melville. His books, considered today, are so abnormal among the traditional works that stock our shelves. The bestseller lists are full of romance and mystery and other sugary quick hits that serve to entertain. Lest I be called a snob, genre fiction has its place, and audiences clearly love it. But should all books be just another form of passing the time, no different from television?
Literature, like all great art, can exist on a higher plane. Readers still know this. There was a ninth-month pre-order period for McCarthy’s latest books. What other author, writing literary fiction, would excite you about a book release?
I was almost nervous to read a new McCarthy novel. What if it didn’t live up to his earlier works? What if it tarnished his record? I need not have worried. The Passenger totally slapped and wrapped up his career in a way I wasn’t expecting. It’s philosophical, returning to the depth found in Blood Meridian and The Crossing, yet still contains the pace of No Country for Old Men and The Road. Plus it’s humorous and filled with ____ characters like Suttree and All The Pretty Horses. Basically, it’s everything you’d want from McCarthy.
That McCarthy isn’t more popular is a shame, though I understand why. Let me try to convince you, and in a way, offer up an apologia to my family and friends who don’t understand why I enjoy reading his difficult, brutal novels.
I’ll start with the violence. To reduce McCarthy to merely the horrific details of his books is to miss the broader purpose. This is not violence without cause. Blood Meridian, the bloodiest of them all, follows “the kid”, whose journey among a band of scalp-hunting degenerates introduces him to mind-numbing inhumanity. Yet, in the first chapter, McCarthy declares the point of the book is to “try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”
No Country for Old Men, more famous for the 2007 film adaptation by the Coen Brothers, explores similar unconscionable depravity as Sheriff Bell reckons with Anton Chigurh, a man who kills random citizens at the mercy of a coin toss with an air-compressed cattle gun he feeds up his sleeve. Grotesque, yes, but the point of the novel is not just to shock us. We are all Sheriff Bell, faced with an increasingly dark and unrecognizable world. What responsibility do we carry, and at what point do we toss in the flag?
For all McCarthy’s bleakness (of which, admittedly, there’s too much to name), it always serves a bigger purpose. Is it worth reading about such dark topics? That depends. I find the payoff satisfactory.
Then there’s the language. McCarthy’s prose is unlike any other. Nature comes alive beneath his pen (actually, his typewriter), whether it’s the steep hills of Appalachia, the red, creosote-covered planes of the Southwest, or the pale coasts of Louisiana. Reading McCarthy is like reading the Bible, a philosophical treatise, and a thriller all at the same time. His protagonists are often quiet yet rarely introspective, allowing McCarthy to paint a world that may not exist within their capacity to understand.
Great writing for the sake of great writing is indulgent, and plot without beauty is pulp. McCarthy is neither, weaving together the prettiest sentences you’ll ever read with a gripping pace. His books contain amazing characters, romance, heartache, brotherhood, and sacrifice. As he once said in an interview, “If it doesn't concern life and death, it's not interesting.” His books are certainly full of both.
Where should you start with McCarthy, if I’ve somehow convinced you to give his books a try? I’d start with All the Pretty Horses. With perhaps the most straightforward plot, it’s a true Western classic that had me howling with laughter and rooting for a doomed romance. Plus, you somehow come away feeling like you’d be a good cowboy. If that suits you, No Country for Old Men is even better than the movie. The Road is perhaps the easiest to read, containing a very stripped-back style for McCarthy, yet it is very dark. It’s the only McCarthy novel that made me cry.
Save the Appalachia novels, McCarthy’s first four books, for a little later, as they have the most peculiar style. Blood Meridian is the pinnacle, truly one of the greatest books ever written, and in my opinion, The Passenger comes surprisingly close. Still, the range of his books attract a range of readers, all who consider it a pleasure to bask in the glory of his mastery.
I remember once on an episode of Criminal Minds there was a character named Cormac. I thought they just made it up.
I’m reading a cool book by a couple of my favourite authors, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, called “Diablo Mesa”, about the 1947 Roswell saucer crash! Lots of intrigue!