McCarthyism Comes to the UK

I enjoyed reading January Magazine’s take on the popularity of Cormac McCarthy’s work. As the Coen brother’s adaptation of No Country for Old Men opens in cinemas throughout the United Kingdom, all things McCarthy are taking root in Britain as well.

I’ve enjoyed McCarthy’s writing for what it is: spare, brutal and pessimistic existential musings on the darker side of mankind. But do the literary critics here in Britain agree with my spare and brutal distillation of McCarthy’s work?

Last week, The Guardian took a run at McCarthy’s work:

The style of late-period McCarthy -- he was born in 1933 -- is characterised by its philosophical pessimism, pared-down sentences and restrained vocabulary. In contrast, there is nothing stylistically restrained about his earlier work, especially the mid-period novels Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridian (1985). Set in the mid-19th century, Blood Meridian ostensibly concerns the wanderings of a band of scalp-hunters in south-west Texas and Mexico. But most important is McCarthy’s grand style, his astounding gift for language. Take his description of a raid by horse-riding Native Americans on a group of white settlers making their way across an isolated plain: “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo ... ”

And so the sentence goes on, unbroken, for at least another half-page, the spillage of hundreds of words, with clauses linked only by the most important word in McCarthy's lexicon, the connective “and”. (You read his novels and search in vain for a colon or semi-colon or long dash.) It's a virtuoso performance, as is the entire novel, a gothic extravaganza and one of the oddest books I've ever read.

You can read the entire piece here.

The Times recently picked The Road as one of their bookclub reads with “star-reader” Monnie Black describing it thusly:

I had no idea that The Road would be quite so moving. I settled down to read the last 30 pages wearing a face mask. What a mistake! I was supposed to keep my features still, but I twitched in sorrow. I have been recommending the book to my friends who are concerned that it sounds too sad. But I have reassured them that at the very end you feel uplifted. It is hardly a happy ending in the traditional sense but is as happy as it could be, given that the Earth has practically been burnt to a crisp. In a strange way the ending felt realistic.

The only way for mankind to struggle on would be to believe in God or to believe in the goodness of those who have died while protecting the ones they loved. The boy does not have to be religious but he does need to believe in goodness while, all around him, some choose an evil path for survival

The Times’ Book Club report is here.

The Sunday Times dissects and delineates McCarthy and his work staring with this introduction:

Until the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992, Cormac McCarthy was considered the best unknown novelist in America. None of his previous novels, which included Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridian (1985), had sold more than 2,500 copies in hard cover. There was good reason for his obscurity: McCarthy’s books were, and are, implacably grim and violent. They are also stylistically challenging, often plotless, lacking traditional punctuation and arcane in their vocabulary. And McCarthy did nothing to publicise them or himself. As “the most celebrated recluse in American literature since JD Salinger”, he refuses to go on book tours, won’t teach or lecture, and (reluctantly) gave his first substantive interview only in 1992, to The New York Times.

Then The Times brings up these interesting facts about this enigmatic and reclusive writer:

CORMAC McCARTHY IS NOT HIS REAL NAME McCarthy was born in 1933, the third of six children, and named Charles after his father, a well-to-do lawyer. In 1937, the family moved from Rhode Island to Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy dropped out of the University of Tennessee and in 1953 joined the air force. At some point, he changed his name to Cormac, apparently after the Irish king. For a while, he lived on Ibiza with his second wife, the singer Anne DeLisle. From the mid1970s until the mid1980s, he lived in El Paso, Texas. He is now married to Jennifer Winkley, an academic, with whom he has a son. He lives just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

For most of his life, McCarthy was extremely poor, living in barns and shacks and writing in motel rooms. He carried a high-wattage light bulb around in a lens case, and would screw it in so he could see better in motels. Somehow, partly through grants, partly through some kind of inexplicable providence, he survived. “I had no money – I mean none,” he said recently. “I had run out of toothpaste, and I was wondering what to do when I went to the mailbox and there was a free sample.” CORMAC McCARTHY IS OLD-FASHIONED He likes people to be punctual. “If you can’t know where a man is going to be when he says he’s going to be there, how can you trust him about anything else?” he says.

The Times piece is here.

Cormac McCarthy’s Papers Hit the Road

There’s bound to be more on this soon but, for the moment, it’s just a teensy squibble in the New York Times’ arts section. The (living) Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy (The Road, All the Pretty Horses) has sold his archives for $2 million.

We last reported on McCarthy’s comings and goings in this space back in March 2007 when Oprah selected the author’s 2006 novel, The Road, for her book club.

Meanwhile, The New York Times’ squibble is here. They’ve also put together a great collection of McCarthy facts and internal links here.

On The Road with Oprah

We told you it was coming, and now it’s here. Amid a great rush of fanfare, Oprah has made her choice. The author is brilliant and celebrated and the book in question was adored by both critics and readers when it was released last fall, but the story of a father and son coming to grips with each other and life in a post-apocalyptic America still seems an odd choice for Oprah. Says Popmatters:

What seems to have been a nuclear winter has settled over the world, leaving little in its wake. There are references to the immediate aftermath, when “the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded ... creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland ... The frailty of everything revealed at last.” By the time The Road is set, however, even those years are a distant memory, the only people the father and son come across are best avoided, desperate creatures with little left to eat but each other.

The California Literary Review seemed almost to go into raptures stretching for the right -- and sufficient -- praise for the book:

Post apocalyptic novels are a dark, bleak and often illuminating genre that are highlighted by titles that include The Day of the Triffids, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Eternity Road, On The Beach and Galapagos. J.G. Ballard carved out a large section of this wasted landscape with The Crystal World, The Drowning World, The Burning World and The Wind From Nowhere. But among all of these fine works and dozens more I’ve read, none compares, holds a candle to or rings such gloomy, bleak chords as does Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; all accomplished with an economy of words that is beautiful in its execution.

And I love this line from the same review. How could you not? “I read this book in one take late at night and immediately headed downstairs to kick up the fire and drink some bourbon. I was cold, chilled emotionally, stunned, awe-struck by McCarthy’s words.”

But on Oprah’s Web site, the motivation for choosing The Road becomes more clear. Not only is it a wonderful book, it’s one that invites conversation and even discussion, like the kind Oprah asks for on her book club Web site. “What do you think destroyed the world? How far would you go to protect your child? What is the difference between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’? Share your thoughts with others on the message board.”

Though his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965, McCarthy, 73, is perhaps best known for 1992’s All the Pretty Horses. And the book did very well on its own, long before the release of the movie based on the work came out in 2000 starring Matt Damon, Henry Thomas and Penelope Cruz.

McCarthy is notoriously private and has only rarely granted interviews. An interview with the writer is promised, however. It will be interesting to see how the interaction between the Chicago media maven and the reclusive literary giant unfolds.