One of my favorite authors. If you haven't read anything of him, start with "The Road" and "Child of God", they are quite accessible and highly thrilling (I also strongly suspect that Patrick Süskind read "Child of God" before he wrote "Perfume: Story of a Murderer").
"No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in another league and one of the best novels of the past century. It also contains one of the greatest characters ever, Judge Holden [0]
He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. 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.
Thanks for this. I have yet to read Blood Meridian. I have read The Road and NCFOM. Both were great and absorbing reads. But I have one major gripe with CM (if I am allowed to do so). It's not his style - in fact it's his unique and great style of writing that would make anyone forget about what I'm going to say.
My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singular savagery of ONE man against all - takes the assumed position that humans by nature (generally, of course) will almost always reduce to selfish savagery even to the point of normalising cannibalism. Of course, he needed to create this assumed backdrop for many of his stories (eg The Road needed this literally visceral danger for a father to demonstrate his instinctive protection for his only son) but CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.
I know you can't criticise a work of fiction this way, an author is entitled his artistic philosophy and outlook. But when the writing is so masterful, when the rest of the philosophies of the stories are so elevated and cerebrally engaging, one can't help but find the story of humans cultivating others for food jarring and out of place.
(This is my first "criticism" of any work of literature.)
The Road is his only post-apocalyptic novel, it's not really a theme of his.
The potential for savagery, how easy it is for some to take a human life or completely disregard it is a theme that runs in many of his novels. In a post-apocalyptic scenario like in The Road, where everyone is literally scavenging for their lives you can bet your ass life will become a horror show. Not for everyone, not anywhere, but for enough people to determine that it is part of human nature just a much as extending help to one another.
To me CM's work explores the duality of beauty (in the most expansive sense of the word) and tragedy that exists in the world.
I recommend All the Pretty Horses if you want something less intense than The Road or Blood Meridian but no less powerful. One my favorite quotes:
“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
With good authors, I would always keep metaphor in mind. In the case of The Road, I think what you're hitting on arguably the single most critical question the book asks: do we cooperate because we're benevolent, or do we cooperate because we're selfish and cooperation furthers our own interests?
When working together is clearly beneficial, not cooperating is simply illogical. But what happens when cooperation is not only not clearly beneficial, but may even be actively detrimental? What happens if you're starving to death, and you see a weaker man who has enough, barely enough, to feed himself approaching? And that is all there is?
Adding a notion of a child, of the future itself, into the picture makes it all the more difficult.
Some of this is in the service of making commentary on broader topics. I view Blood Meridian as a treatise on the horrific nature of war. McCarthy accomplishes this via an endlessly gruesome tale, but the underlying message couldn’t be more clear.
> ...but CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.
I've literally only read the Cliff's Notes version of The Road, but the scenario it describes seems far bleaker, prolonged, and hopeless than any historical event you might look for as precedent. It seems quite plausible that what the book describes is after some people tried to pull together in some feel-good way, and then failed and fell apart again because it wasn't going to work.
>... CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.
This is very tangential, but this is one of the reasons I could never get into The Walking Dead and similar shows. It was really hard for me to suspend my disbelief there.
I highly recommend Suttree, which is much less in that post-apocalyptic vein. It’s incredibly humanistic and funny and I think it’s his best work. It still has his incredible command of the English language and sequences of just absolutely beautiful prose, and in some ways it can be quite devastating but it’s much more balanced with the endearing parts of humanity I think.
Suttree is an early work, and said to be heavily autobiographical. I read it as a key to understanding McCarthy's view of the world, being essentially tragic.
I'd suggest there's a similar identification between the author and the Kid of Blood Meridian.
What McCarthy thinks of Melville's Moby Dick I have not heard, but for the reader anyway, there's a rich cross-fertilization. Both of ideas -- being a pawn within a monstrous, doomed enterprise -- and of technique, as with the cryptic oracles of catastrophe who say their piece and then vanish from the narrative.
> post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singular savagery
If you were to show me that phrase and ask which book matches it most closely, I would have to say "Blood Meridian". It's a singular work. Texas-Mexico border area, 1850s. It's definitely post-apocalyptic, the aftermath of an invasion of technologically sophisticated but genocidally savage aliens ... for the native Americans.
It's also worth noting that for Blood Meridian, McCarthy learned Spanish and did five years of historical research with his MacArthur award money. The broad strokes of the story are true - there really was a group of scalp hunters who went rogue, raping and murdering the people they had been hired to protect.
Any historical "invasion of technologically sophisticated aliens" in the time period blood meridian is set in happened centuries before. It's actually near a zenith of native political and military power. Spain is gone, Mexico is struggling to build a government, and the US hasn't yet become a dominant power in the region.
Blood meridian is a book I often recommend as an approachable introduction to what people experiencing the period might have thought, but framing the context is somewhat important.
> Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.
I find it hard to agree with this after COVID showed that a substantial portion of the US and global population weren't willing to wear masks to protect their fellow man and life saving vaccines were purposefully politicized. I also think that post apocalyptic novels typically live in a world where traditional power structures have been abandoned/destroyed and individualism is necessary for survival so I'm not sure one can draw a parallel between typical catastrophes and apocalyptic events.
Love Cormac as well he is also one of my favourite authors. That Judge passage is also one of my favourite passages in literature, alongside the ending of The Road which I have framed with a technical drawing of a brook trout:
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 could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
Just finished Cities of the Plain after reading the rest of the border trilogy and not being that impressed, but this one absolutely floored me and I shed tears at the end. Will need to go back and read all three in quick succession at some point.
His prose is just immaculate. Do yourself a favor and read the above passage out loud. It has a driving rhythm. What’s amazing is that he maintains the beat for entire novels.
Have you spent any time in the southwest United States? Those books hit me a particular way after many trips to west Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. McCarthy has a way of capturing that landscape....
No I’ve never been to the states, I’ve always wanted to though. I want to visit so many states since America has such a huge cultural influence on me especially my fiction, but I live in Australia so it’s kind of impractical. Can’t wait to get there some day!
Maybe it's just because it was the order I read his work in, but I'd start with "Blood Meridian". It's just beyond so many other books out there. Same with the Border Trilogy.
I'm coincidentally reading "The Road" right now for the first time -- somehow I never made it to it over the years -- and honestly I'm not sure I'd have gone into the rest of his work so deeply if I had started with it. Same with "Suttree". They're good, but "Blood Meridian" and the Border Trilogy I barely took breaks from while reading. Just plowed through them front to back. When I got to the end of "Blood Meridian" I just started at the front again. No need for a warm up, just jump right in to some of the best literature you'll ever encounter.
Sure, though my point is that I read Blood Meridian first and didn't find it all that hard to get into. It's just so good you'll give it your full attention and effort. Had I started with Suttree or The Road I may have just given up and not gotten to Blood Meridian at all. I put both of those books down for significant periods of time. I'm trying to finish The Road right now.
I actually found "All the Pretty Horses" to be the harder read, since he'll just write full dialogues in Spanish, and it's not just a couple of times, it happens often (my Spanish is just ok, enough to survive traveling in latin america).
Ok that passage from Blood Meridian is obviously great, but posting it out of context like this makes my skin crawl! It's almost a spoiler. Without knowing the preceding events, and the general way in which the story is grounded in reality, the otherworldliness of this passage is totally out of context!
I read post after post of gushing praise for Cormac McCarthy, so I bought The Road on Kindle a few years ago. A few pages in I wished I had bought a hardcopy -- the e-book seemed to have been badly OCRed, and was missing most of the punctuation and a few of the spaces.
Another few pages later, I looked up whether other people had the same problem. I was surprised to find that there was no issue with the Kindle copy. That's just how McCarthy writes. Although it's no secret, most people don't mention it -- somehow it had never come up in any of the glowing reviews I'd read. It's not been mentioned in any of the 30-ish comments in this thread so far.
Now, it's a little thing, so it shouldn't bug me so much. But it did.
When I read a work of fiction, I do not want to be thinking about the writer or his stylistic choices. My brain's little imagination engine should be cranking away, running the projector, imagining the characters speaking, moving, thinking, and feeling. Words from the page flow into it like fuel.
With McCarthy, the engine would snarl and grind every time I hit some ugly looking naked contraction like "werent" or "didnt", or a bit of unquoted dialog that I didn't realize was a character speaking until the end of the sentence. The projector skipped a frame, and for that moment I was no longer thinking of "The Man" or "The Boy", but involuntarily thinking of "The Author" and his smug need to be special, to remind me of his presence, to prove that the rules of language are beneath him.
Ironically, the justifications I have read for this style are that it's supposed to flow more naturally. Apparently punctuation is unnecessary, baroque, and only slows the reader down. Perhaps many readers agree with that, but I don't. I've spent most of my life reading English that was written according to standard rules of grammar, so it parses readily. McCarthy's "house rules" grammar does not.
That all leaves a question. I finished The Road and found it to be OK. Would I have loved it, had it been written in conventional style? Still probably not. But at least I wouldn't be annoyed at the author.
Your "meta" criticism is fair, and it's something I would normally bridle at as well, but in McCarthy's case, it just has me hooked, though it takes a while to get into the flow.
In a less artificial way you could say the same about any writing that reads as non-standard, for instance it took me a long time to appreciate Shakespeare coming from a familiarity with modern English, but eventually I got it and it was life-changing.
Obviously in McCarthy's case there is a "problem" of intent, but I think if you can replace your suspicion with an assumption of artistic good faith, you may be able to relax into the flow more easily.
I believe you hit the nail on the head with the whole problem of intent thing. I can enjoy reading antiquated works written in antiquated style, like Shakespeare, because I know that they were made in an effective way for the time. I get over it, I get used to it, I move on. Kind of similar to watching a black & white movie, for example Dr. Strangelove is one of my favorite movies of all time and it doesn't need to be colorized or remade. Even a movie made in B&W after color became standard, like Schindler's List, I can understand the effect the creators are going for. But if somebody came out with a movie where they did something wacky like invert all the colors for no apparent reason, I would find it annoying and distracting.
It does lead to a fun hypothetical. If Cormac McCarthy was a dead author from the nth century, and his writing style was the way everybody wrote in the nth century, I wouldn't hold it against him. I would probably be able to get used to it, and quit muttering "this son of a bitch" aloud every two pages. Although I still doubt I would be a huge fan, I likely would be more appreciative of his work than I am now. But it would be exactly the same work, the same letters on the page. Why should the context change make any difference at all?
So maybe that just makes me petty. But even if so, I can't argue myself into enjoying something I don't enjoy.
The thing that stuck with me after reading The Road was the crushing sadness. I finished the book on my honeymoon at midnight and cried for a long time.
>When I read a work of fiction, I do not want to be thinking about the writer or his stylistic choices.
That's the difference between "reading fiction" and literature: text as a work of art. Great authors are present through their style. How they tell their story is an important as what the story is about. Attributing it to the author being smug is as ridiculous as saying that Picasso should paint his objects in a way that conforms more to how they look in real life.
You can hav a grat, distinctiv writing styl without distracting th radr with what look lik constant rrors.
Rmoving parts of th languag that you find unncssary just fls lik bing cutsy for its own sak. I don't gt what it adds to th rading xprinc.
Similar to how my rmoval of th most common lttr from this post dosn't simplify it, it maks it annoying to rad.
But I admit I am a lowbrow typ and I don't work vry hard to lik things that I don't lik at first tast.
Thanks for sharing this. Link to the paper mentioned in the NYT story, "Cormac McCarthy’s Interviews in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1968–1980" (The Cormac McCarthy Journal (2022) 20 (2): 108–135; free access): https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/cormac-mccart...
To me, Cormac McCarthy has an incredibly good sense of how people actually speak. As a side note, same thing was also said somewhere about Quentin Tarantino -- as one of the most relevant reasons why his movies are "cult".
I got a few paragraphs into the article and realized that I feel weird about reading an article that oriented around sharing inconsequential private details he probably regrets divulging decades ago. I don't need to know about his private life to appreciate his books. I think it's fine for scholars to dig this stuff up and record it, but I don't need to read about it.
+1, I was thinking the same thing, even though I am definitely and eagerly going to read the research paper on McCarthy's rediscovered interviews. There was a beauty in his reluctance to give interviews; I admit having spent a lot of time years ago to track down stuff that would shed some light on his personality and the rationale behind his punctuation style. And, I felt kind of happy to realize that I have to make most of the conclusions myself.
I liked the image of Cormac McCarthy the recluse, but oh well.
In the age of digital archives, there's no "right to be forgotten" for geniuses, I guess.
‘The find [of the early interviews] comes as McCarthy is preparing to publish two new intertwined novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” — his first since 2006, when he released “The Road,” a best seller that won the Pulitzer Prize.
‘McCarthy will give no interviews in conjunction with their release. Instead, here is a look back at a less guarded time in his life.’
Everyone loves "The Road", but more than half the book is the kid saying he's scared, hungry, or cold and dad saying it's going to be ok. The repetition gets ridiculous.
I first heard of Cormac McCarthy when Harold Bloom raved about his "Blood Meridian". I am sorry to say this, I was not moved by Cormac McCarthy. I read "All the Pale Horses", and "No Country for Old Men". I started reading "Blood Meridian", but there was a gruesome scene involving infants. I never saw the point of Judge Holden, even though in my mind, I kept visualizing him being played by Daniel Day-Lewis. My plan is to read "Cities of the Plain" and "Outer Dark" - they are poetic titles, but I wonder whether I should spend the time.
I think you will find those two novels similar to his other work. Also, there is a book in the Border Trilogy between "All the Pretty Horses" and "Cities of the Plain" - "The Crossing".
"Suttree" doesn't come up as often as his other work but is my personal favorite. There are some darker moments but it's a very funny book - a lot of "Charles Portis"-esque conversations and encounters.
Blood Meridian left me with the feeling that Judge Holden was originally multiple characters turned into a composite to serve as a narrative device and metaphor. I think I would have enjoyed the book more if it had been a straightforward odyssey of the kid, involving the many people and situations he encountered along the way. Using the Judge as a thematic binder sort of ruined it for me.
There’s a lot of interpretations and I don’t know if he’s ever endorsed one, but I see the judge as a general representation of a concept I’d describe loosely as capitalism, or the Industrial Revolution, or western technological progress in general.
He’s the embodiment of a force that just overtops and envelops everything in its path. It’s doesn’t even make sense to consider him moral or immoral or amoral (as many do when considering him a stand in for the devil) but more as a force that just transcends morality completely and makes it irrelevant, a force that has no other purpose but to expand and consume resources, indifferent to death or convention or tradition. A force that never sleeps.
I think the scene where he calmly ignores the Indian attack while making explosives is probably the most literal example but the theme runs through his character.
"No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in another league and one of the best novels of the past century. It also contains one of the greatest characters ever, Judge Holden [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Holden