I posted this originally on my old blog, but since I deleted all of those posts, I thought I would re-post this here in honor of McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize.
I first heard about Cormac McCarthy in graduate school, when All the Pretty Horses made its first stir and many of the professors in my department were reading it. Since this school was in California, there was quite a lot of interest in western literature, and many of the English professors felt some kinship with the agricultural side of the college, making McCarthy’s novel even more appealing. I remember getting the feeling as I overheard conversations that there was something big happening here and that I was not quite getting it. I hadn’t heard of McCarthy before, and I felt that I was coming in on the discussion too late. There was a sense of the occult—there were hidden worlds and meanings here and I had not been granted admission into the inner sanctum.
McCarthy’s prose style tends to generate such responses, I think. He writes with a madly messianic intensity that grabs you, the reader, by the throat and drags you to some bleak prospect on top of a dusty, barren mountain covered with vomited chunks of volcanic slag, only to leave you, jeans torn and palms bleeding to witness some more horrific degradation than before. I have read critics of McCarthy wax lyrical in their contempt for his overblown rhetoric and fancy vocabulary, pointing out that it doesn’t really make sense if you look at the words closely and analyze their meaning. And the critics are often right about this; in the moments when his prose becomes ever more purple and turgid, the words themselves almost seem to become afterthoughts, inconsiderable wisps of language.
But that, I think, is missing the point.
McCarthy’s language can be a mess, rhetorically speaking, but it sings. In a blog post from last summer, I parodied McCarthy’s style, and it is fairly easy to parody, with its long, long sentences, devoid of commas but rife with coordinating conjunctions, stuffed to the bursting point with difficult, often archaic words, and haunted by an apocalyptic sense of impending doom. It is the book of Revelation, spoken by a man as mad as John, filtered through the lens of true millennial anxieties, and imagined by a mind’s eye that cannot blink or look away from the horrifying comedy of existence.
When one of his novels made it to the New York Times bestseller list, the little one-line description that the editors provided called the book “high-brow Zane Grey,” which is both accurate but wildly wrong as those little snippets usually are. He often writes “westerns,” but to place them in the same category as a good old John Wayne oater is to place a bodice-ripping Harlequin romance and the Marquis de Sade on the same shelf. I’ll let you figure out which book McCarthy is more like. On the other hand, there are the elements of the western in many of his books: the cowboys, the horses, the gunplay, the setting. He places his cowboy characters in typical situations—a cowboy goes to work for a rancher, say—and turns it into something else. It is as if a short walk to the corner store turned into a trip to Dante’s Inferno.
One western element that transcends the genre permeates his novels: the obsession with work. In another review from many years ago, a critic said that no author since Melville has focused as much on the minutiae of work as McCarthy. He is a man who knows how to do things, and he revels in the revealing details. In The Crossing, he spends pages describing how to prepare and set out a trap to catch a wolf. In All the Pretty Horses, he tells us, in graphically gory detail, how to sterilize a gunshot wound. The devil, as they say, is in the details, and McCarthy writes with the devil seated at his left hand.
And yet McCarthy is perhaps one of the most religiously informed mainstream writers I know, perhaps saving John Updike. His novels almost read like allegories of biblical prophecies gone horribly wrong. The pervasive odor of brimstone wafts from the pages of most of his books, and the main theme of every story is sin. He is truly the inheritor of Melville’s and Hawthorne’s dark, redstained visions, and he grabs us by the hair and makes us look at the gibbering, slobbering demons as they dance their mad capers in wild, hellish glee.
Every one of his novels is a quest narrative. In Blood Meridian, perhaps the most disturbing book I have ever read, the quest tends southward, as so many of his stories do, as the characters hunt other men to slaughter them and sell their scalps for the government bounties. Outer Dark has a twin or even triple quest as the bedraggled woman-child searches for the baby born of her incestuous relationship with her brother, while her brother searches for her, and an unholy trinity of cannibalistic criminals searches for whatever they can find.
The Road reads like a culmination of McCarthy’s novels. It foregrounds the apocalyptic terror of earlier novels and that terror informs every image, every theme, every speech, every act of the story. The novel begins about ten years after the end of the world, probably a nuclear war. Nearly everyone has been killed, and those who have not been killed are either the victims of roving bands of Road-Warrior-like survivors, or have seen what little humanity they have left vaporize with civilization. But all of this is background, and McCarthy does very little world-building (or perhaps world-destroying is better) here; instead, he hints and lets us use these hints to rummage through our mental files of the end of the world to find the images that terrorize us and make us wake up with screams lodged in our throats in the deep, dark hours before dawn.
A man, never named, and his son, likewise never named, are heading south. They are the “good guys,” as the boy says repeatedly as if in reassurance, or more likely as this is McCarthy here, in a mantra or prayer. They carry the flame. Nuclear winter has set in, and the sun is never visible. Nearly all forms of life are extinct, including most humans. Everything is ash-gray, except for the detritus of civilization, the things that the man and boy must scrounge to keep themselves alive: a blue plastic tarp, the bright yellow rubber boots. And then there is the bright red blood that the man keeps coughing up.
This is survival honed to its sharpest, finest edge, with no room for error, no comfy afterlife after being voted off the island. In several scenes, the pair come upon the ruins of a town, and they search the rubble and trash for things that might help them make it one more week, but since the war is ten years in the past, the remains have been thoroughly picked over by other survivors. The man and boy dig through trashcans, looking for some tiny scrap of something, a few drops of motor oil left in discarded plastic cans for their lamp, a pair of derelict shoes, a shred of cloth to wrap around the mouth and nose, anything. Here McCarthy’s talent for describing work becomes pointed, painful in its intensity and desperation. Instead of a page on setting a wolf trap, we are treated to a paragraph on opening a desperately needed jar of food that has lain untouched since before the war. The tension is elemental.
This novel is also stripped of all ornamentation. Gone are many of the dictionary-breaking words and lushly meandering sentences. Instead, there are clipped lists of sentence fragments. Short sharp images of desolation. Quick terse notes of characterization. The language lacks the lyrical qualities of some of the earlier novels, but it has the roughly polished grace and deadly intent of the shard of obsidian that the boy’s mother probably used to kill herself shortly after he is born.
Here is the last paragraph of the story, the only moment of hope, and it’s a lost hope, a hope that is not allowed to grow but must be ripped out and burnt:
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which would not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
But they no longer exist. Their maps of the world in its becoming are now as tattered and torn and ultimately useless as the ancient and crumbling gas station map that the man uses in his southern journey. There is not more. The sacred humming of mystery is silent.
This is a dark, dark, dark book. Read it.
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The Hobgoblin of Little Minds 