There is intense disagreement about McCarthy’s literary status, which his new novel, “No Country for Old Men” (Knopf; $24.95), an unimportant, stripped-down thriller, will only aggravate. Some readers are alienated by his novels’ punctual appointments with blood-soaked violence... Others think his work bombastic, pretentious, or claustrophobically male-locked: McCarthy has a tendency to omit half the human race from serious scrutiny. But a balanced assessment has been hard to come by, because his reputation, at least since the publication of “Blood Meridian,” in 1985, has been cultic.
What this debate lacks is the input of a completely unread blogger, so lemme pitch in my twopenny: McCarthy's work before "All the Pretty Horses" is a catalogue of mean, atheistic genius. It's the anti-Franzen, and what is more worthy of thanks?
The Wild West of Blood Meridian was a place where Indians slaughtered whites who slaughtered Mexicans who slaughtered Indians and none of them could bring more meaning to the slaughter than their own arbitrary cultural rationalizations. The American South depicted in Suttree was filled by a doomed underclass too ignorant, superstitious, and beaten to feel anything more profound than an anger at God and a fear of death. McCarthy wrote about the people who could only make it into the history books as statistics because no higher narrative could be applied to their hopeless stories. Powerful stuff.
Then came "All The Pretty Horses," which was eventually turned into a movie starring Matt Damon. I wish I could blame the actor for what happened, but no one made McCarthy right the following plunker, describing his protagonist's first glimpse of his love interest:
“He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.”
I'd ask you to read it again, but I don't want any of my friends to slip into a diabetic coma from this Nicholas Sparks-esque saccharinity. Every book McCarthy has written since AtPH had similar spoonfuls of Splenda stirred into it.
If people want to debate the old McCarthy's place in the world of American lit, the question is only how high to place him. But if you also consider his more recent work, then things get dodgy, because real genius isn't supposed to drive itself into a literary cul-de-sac.
A 1932 review of William Faulkner’s Light in August in the New York Times Book Review asserted that “that somewhat crude and altogether brutal power which thrust itself through [Faulkner’s] previous work is in this book disciplined... admitting justice and compassion to his scheme of things... to a greater effectiveness than one would have believed possible in so short a time.”
Faulkner and McCarthy were basically equals at wallowing the mud and the blood and the beer. They both eventually started to introduce hope and love into their universes, but only one of them has been able to make it work so far.
That said, an author can still get pretty far (or pretty close to truth) with a purely cynical and atheistic view of humanity. Take this story from Florida.
For the first three or four paragraphs, it's simply a view of the worst family imaginable. But then somewhere around where the word "Cheetos" appears, the story descends into McCarthy-style insanity of the damned. You get the jibblies at the realization that you're the same species as these people.
I do think it's too late for C-Mac to go back to covering just the dregs of society. A writer's like a shark, to paraphrase Woody. His work has gotta keep going forward or it dies. I just hope he finds his way to some fresh meat.
