The Monster Returns

The wild man of American letters is back with his first book in seven years.

Times have changed for Cormac McCarthy, and his life is much different than it was prior to 1992 when his work was unread outside university graduate schools and literary salons. Back then he lived mostly in cheap motels and ate canned food warmed on a hotplate. He survived thirty years of utter obscurity, during which two wives left him, unable to endure the grinding poverty.

Some critics have taken McCarthy to task for the ubiquity of mindless violence in his novels, perpetrated by evil, even demonic men whose motives aren't revealed or even hinted at. McCarthy never moralizes or attempts to explain, he just lays the mayhem out deadpan. To my mind, this reflects actual reality, the real state of affairs in a world where police most often describe the violence they encounter as "senseless."

However, hardly anyone denies McCarthy's prodigious writing skill and verbal gifts (only one reviewer of my acqaintance disagreed with the universal acclaim). His prose erupts volcanically from the page, with tremendous density and sometimes overwhelming energy. From the book that made him famous, 1992's Blood Meridian:

"They entered the city in a gantlet of flung offal, driven like cattle through the cobbled streets with shouts going up behind for the soldiery who smiled as became them and nodded among the flowers and proferred cups, herding the tattered fortune seekers through the plaza where water splashed in a fountain and idlers reclined on carven seats of white porphyry and past the governor's palace and past the cathedral where vultures squatted along the dusty entablatures and among the niches in the carved facade hard by the figures of Christ and the apostles, the birds holding out their own dark vestments in postures of strange benevolence while about them flapped on the wind the dried scalps of slaughtered indians strung on cords, the long dull hair swinging like the filaments of certain seaforms and the dry hides clapping against the stones."

Word. Now there's a sentence for you.

The New Yorker's reviewer, James Wood, didn't like the new book. He praises the style but appears uncomfortable with the absence of any rationale for the violence, or to put it less charitably, moralizing.

I'll suspend judgment till I've read it, although I have to say I like McCarthy's earlier stuff better. His m.o. seems to have become a little more commercially-oriented since Hollywood put All the Pretty Horses on the screen, and No Country for Old Men has already been picked up by the studios.

My own personal favorite is Outer Dark, but I have to say that Blood Meridian is a prodigious accomplishment, not to be missed.

Nobody since Flannery O'Connor has rendered dialectical conversation as well as McCarthy, and with his absence of small-bore punctuation, he's even better at it than she was.

A complete list of his novels includes:
The Orchard Keeper (1965)
Outer Dark (1968)
Child of God (1974)
Suttree (1979)
Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
The Crossing (1994)
Cities of the Plain (1998)

And now the new one, which is in the mail.