Click 
For my seventh venture into McCarthy’s novels, I chose his debut (I’m apparently on a debut streak right now) The Orchard Keeper (1965). For me, this was his most difficult yet, perhaps because much of the time I didn’t really feel like I knew what was going on and didn’t entirely trust that the obfuscation was with valid purpose. More than any other McCarthy novel, I had to work very hard to follow the narrative thread (or, rather, to find the narrative thread after losing it several times). There were some pay-offs, though. Well before I finished it, I already could tell it was going to be a book that I would enjoy thinking about more than I enjoyed reading it. Was it worth it? The answer, of course, is it depends.
The book begins with a disorienting italicized scene that sets up a metaphor. A couple of African American cemetery workers (who do not play another role in the novel) are trying to cut through a tree when they discover that an iron fence has “growed all through the tree.” At first glance, the meaning of the metaphor is obvious: something man-made is destroying nature. Basically, that is the metaphor’s essence; however, as The Orchard Keeper develops, the layers of meaning multiply. Yes, on one level it is man’s inclination to destroy nature. But on another level, it is man’s inclination to destroy another man’s nature. Thankfully, McCarthy was intelligent enough at this young age to not give way to meanings quite so simple. Or, in other words, McCarthy has a story to tell; the meaning is almost — but not quite — incidental.
I think the best way to discuss this novel is to give a very short introduction to the characters and plot, even though the book takes a long time for us to get there. The story takes place between the wars in an isolated community in Tennessee. In the first part we meet a drifter who comes off rather menacing. This is Kenneth Rattner, father to our central character (number one), John Wesley Rattner. Later in the novel we learn that he was once (allegedly) a captain. Hanging in his house above his wife and son is his portrait where he, “fleshly of face and rakish in an overseas cap abutting upon his right eyebrow, the double-barred insignia wreathed in light, soldier, father, ghost, eyed them.” There is little of the military captain in the drifter we meet (whether there is anything to the miliatry captain at all remains in doubt for me). He picks up rides and then, foreshadowing many of McCarthy’s most menacing characters, frightens his drivers with opaque statements.
Another of our main characters (number two) Marion Sylder is one of the menaced drivers. When both men are out of the car, Kenneth Rattner inexplicably attacks Sylder. Sylder is able to defend himself and ends up killing Kenneth Rattner. The fight and the aftermath show McCarthy’s already developed gift of developing tension in everyday interaction as he shows just how sudden violence strikes. Sylder eventually takes the dead body to the spray pit in a decaying orchard. Here we meet the last of our main characters (number three), Ather Ownby, the old man who oversees the orchard.
Interestingly, both Ownby and Sylder become surrogate fathers to the young John Wesley Rattner, though it appeared to me that Ownby and Sylder never actually meet face-to-face. The young Rattner does not know that Sylder killed his father and that Ownby knows where the dead body is. But, in fact, Sylder does not know he killed Rattner’s father, and Ownby has no idea whose body lies in the spray pit. It is a complicated set up where no one but the reader knows what has happened.
Honestly, though I found the characters interesting and well realized, I wasn’t much taken in by this McCarthy story. Despite the underlying tensions, the setup between these characters felt relatively tame. To me the novel’s strengths lie in the atmosphere and in the history McCarthy tracks.
Sylder is a bootlegger and runs illegal alcohol around the countryside (I may be wrong, but I believe the only times Ownby sees Sylder is when from the shadows of his hermit home he sees Sylder driving the country road past the orchard). The temperance movement is in full swing:
Long paper banners ran the length of the buses proclaiming for Christ in tall red letters, and for sobriety, offering to vote against the devil when and wherever he ran for office.
As he does in his later works, McCarthy injects into this scene a vast scope. This is not just a period in history. This is an epoch. This is a legend. What it has to say has ramifications beyond the historical as we venture to the fringes and into the liminal space:
Sundays the Knoxville beer taverns were closed, their glass fronts dimmed and muted in sabbatical quietude, and Sylder turned to the mountain to join what crowds marshaled there beyond the dominion of laws either civil or spiritual.
Marion Sylder’s family, in particular, is used to create this epochal feel: “They were a whisky-making family before whiskey-making was illegal, their family mythical, preliterate and legendary.” Of course, we know early on that Sylder’s time is limited, and therefore this myth is about to end. Sylder also knows this and, in fact, one of the best passages in the novel is when a jailed Sylder explains this to the young Rattner who vows to kill the man who took Sylder into captivity. Without attempting to call this a golden age or these characters heroes, this book is nevertheless a lamentation for this lost time. The disorienting tone serves this purpose.
Also, the disorienting nature of the narrative brings to mind a dream (appropriate as the time period now exists only in a dream), and some of the images bolster this impression. For example, in one of my favorite scenes from the first part of the book, a tavern that creaks like a boat seems to explode when its porch falls off. The dream-like quality continues as McCarthy describes the aftermath:
There it continued to burn, generating such heat that the hoard of glass beneath it ran molten and fused in a single sheet, shaped in ripples and flutings, encysted with crisp and blackened rubble, murrhined with bottlecaps. It is there yet, the last remnant of that landmark, flowing down the sharp fold of the valley like some imponderable archaeological phenomenon.
Now, that passage shows to a small extent what The Orchard Keeper proves again and again: young McCarthy already had a phenomenal vocabulary, and he wasn’t afraid to use it. For those who dislike his later work because his vocabulary seems affected or forced, this is certainly not a book to read. I am a fan of McCarthy’s language, but at times The Orchard Keeper was all complex vocabulary all the time. Consequently, because even the most unimportant passage is raised to heights by the lofty language, it felt a bit flat and atonal. Still, McCarthy is able to use it to describe some great scenes, like this one where the police are coming to take Old Man Ownby. When they fear he will fire upon them, they fire away, and we get a great description of the scene from inside the house where Ownby is hiding on the floor.
The kitchen glass exploded in on him then and he got behind the stove. There was a cannonade of shots from the woods and he sat there on the floor listening to it and to the spat spat of bullets passing through the house. Little blooms of yellow wood kept popping out on the planks and almost simultaneously would be the sound of the bullet in the boards on the other side of the room. They did not whine as they passed through. The old man sat very still on the floor. One shot struck the stove behind him and leaped off with an angry spang, taking the glass out of the table lamp. It was like being in a room full of invisible and malevolent spirits.
So, the book is both frustrating and beautiful. It lacks the cohesiveness of McCarthy’s later works, but it also shows his strengths were already highly developed. The story itself is not satisfying, but the atmosphere it evokes is. Therefore, whether the book is worth reading depends. As a fan of McCarthy, I had to read it. I may have been disappointed in one sense, but it worked to satisfy the hunger I feel for McCarthy’s work at times. Its last lines make me hungry for more:
They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.
Late last year I read Cormac McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God; if it wasn’t the most disturbing book I’d ever read, it was sufficiently disturbing to make me forget whatever was. Now I’ve read his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Though I’ve read what some consider to be among the most shocking and violent of books — McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, McCarthy’s The Road — I don’t believe they transgress boundaries of comfort as much as these early McCarthy books. Child of God and Outer Dark are shocking, not because they are more violent than the others — in fact, they aren’t — but because they describe taboos even in today’s liberal society. That is not, certainly, to say they are bad books. Both are exceptional — but this review is about Outer Dark.
The first chapter of Outer Dark is one of the best first chapters I think I’ve ever read. I can say that without worrying about inflating your expectations for the book as a whole because it’s safe to say that it doesn’t quite get as good again. In fact, the first chapter could stand completely alone. After one of McCarthy’s strange italicized paragraph introductions, during which we really don’t know what is going on or who is doing it, McCarthy takes us into the tattered home of Culla and Rinthy Holme. Rinthy is on the bed about to give birth. I’m going to stand aside and let McCarthy introduce the characters in his subtle yet clear way:
Three days after the tinker’s visit she had a spasm in her belly. She said: I got a pain.
Is it it? he said, standing suddenly from the bed where he had sat staring out through the one small glass at the unbroken pine forest.
I don’t know, she said. I reckon.
He swore softly to himself.
You goin to fetch her?
He looked at her and looked away again. No, he said.
She sat forward in the chair, watching across the room with eyes immense in her thin face. You said you’d fetch her when it come time.
I never, he said. I said Maybe.
Fetch her, she said. Now you fetch her.
I cain’t. She’d tell.
Who is they to tell?
Anybody.
You could give her a dollar. Couldn’t you give her a dollar not to tell and she’d not tell?
No. Asides she ain’t nothin but a old geechee nigger witch noway.
She’s been a midnight woman caught them babies lots of times. You said your own self she was a midnight woman used to catch them babies.
She said it. I never.
He could hear her crying. A low bubbling sound, her rocking back and forth. After a while she said: I got anothern. Ain’t you goin to fetch her?
No.
It had begun to rain again. The sun went bleak and pallid toward the woods. He walked into the clearing and looked up at the colorless sky. He looked as if he might be going to say something. After a while he licked the beaded water from his lip and went in again.
I thinks it’s perfect. The precarious circumstances are alluded to only. The tension is built with little dialogue, but it’s exact. In those first few sentences we know that Culla has been avoiding the inevitable. Somehow he appears to have hoped this baby would never be born, that time would stop and not allow the consequences of his shame take flesh. We don’t know how it happened, but, whether consensual or not, Rinthy is carrying her brother Culla’s baby. Which is why Culla wills time to stop and why he won’t call anyone to help. He can’t stop time but he’s going to do what he can to keep this secret.
A baby boy is born. Culla knows that, just as he couldn’t avoid its birth, he can’t avoid the day when his incest is revealed by the presence of the child. So, while Rinthy naps exhausted on the bed, Culla takes the child out in a storm to find a secret place to abandon it. There’s an awful image when Culla lays the child down and it kicks off its blanket, feet peddling in the air.
The next scene, particularly the thumping way McCarthy writes it (or perhaps that was only my heart mixing with my reading), is a mightmare rush through the pine boughs. It is raining harder and harder, with lightning flashing all around, and Culla seems to be running in circles until he finally rushes into a glade.
When he crashed into the glade among the cottonwoods he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried.
It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.
Say what you will about McCarthy’s language and syntax, be it poetic, Biblical, or overblown (all of those in this case), I think it works well in this passage. The image of that child shouting at the storm is the powerful way McCarthy ends this first short chapter.
What remains after that powerful opener is something quite different. The book becomes a road fable, reminding me at times of The Odyssey. After Rinthy discovers that Culla lied about the natural death of their child, Culla leaves to find work and Rinthy leaves to find the child. As they wander they run into a host of individuals, some very good, some bad, and three particularly evil. Throughout the novel, beginning with that strange itallicized introduction, we see these three malicious men have their way with the region in which Culla and Rinthy wander. So, as I’ve found to be the case with most of McCarthy’s work, McCarthy is exploring the boundaries of what is ugly in this world.
He does this with some of his key techniques. As is the case in most of his books, there is an element of play in the evil. In No Country for Old Men, for example, we have Chigurh’s conversation with the store clerk, asking him to call a coin toss. Chigurh never says, “Call this coin incorrectly and I’ll kill you.” The surface is innocuous: “Call it.” But that’s a very thin surface, and the malice is made worse when there is play and spurious innocence. It also creates that wonderful readers’ stress where we don’t want to read on because, this being McCarthy, we know it could end badly even for our favorite charater; but we also don’t want to stop because it’s just awful to leave that character in that situation. We must read on to get the character out of it, even if it means death because at least then the terrible moment is over. Here is what we encounter in Outer Dark:
He removed his hands from his pockets, locked his fingers and pushed them out before him until the knuckles cracked, raised them over his head and gripped the back of his neck with them. Kindly a pretty evenin, ain’t it? he said.
She looked up at a sky heavy and starless above them and laden with the false warmth of impending storm. It’s right dark, she said.
Now it is that, he said. Yes. It is a dark’n. He was looking all about him as if to see was it darker in some places than in others. You ain’t afeared of the dark are ye?
No, she said. I don’t reckon.
Shoot, he said. I bet you’re afeard of the dark. I bet you won’t blow out that there lamp. And me standin right here.
She watched him.
If you was to get scared I’d be right here. Bet ye.
Besides the play, there’s also that element of chance. “Bet ye.” “Call it.” So much of the ugliness is encountered by mere chance, and there’s a lot of it:
I’ll work it out, she said. I can work if I ain’t never had nothing.
Nor never will.
Times is hard.
Hard people makes hard times. I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.
For the most part, this book comes close to maintaining the high energy of that first chapter, and I found it was almost as compelling to read as McCarthy’s other fast-paced novels Child of God, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. At other the pace slackened and it became, in its meandering, a little boring. This went on for only a few pages at a time, and perhaps they were great pages, but I was always wanting the next scene. The stakes felt so high that I didn’t want to stop for long. So, maybe it’s because I just wanted to move on, but the stop-and-go pace of the novel didn’t work for me. I didn’t feel that the slower parts were necessary. We get enough food for thought and beauty of language in small doses like this:
Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.
Like the eminent scholar who introduces the Modern Library edition of Blood Meridian (1985), on previous attempts I failed to read this book through due to the violence. It’s on every page. While I recognized the quality of what I was reading, I just wasn’t in the mood for it at the time. Even when I stopped reading it before, though, I always knew I’d return to it. I’ve finally done it! What changed? Well, I’ve a bit more reading under my belt, both of McCarthy and in general, so my ability to understand (not just recognize) the brilliance was enhanced. But probably the most significant change this time around: I read Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick helped me learn how to read Blood Meridian.
Moby-Dick is definitely one of the highlights not just of last year but of my life in literature. I loved it from page one until that emptying last line. It is no spoiler, and it is important, I believe, to repeat that line here:
It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.
Blood Meridian has been Harold-ed as a worthy successor to Moby-Dick, though it is probably reductive to think of it only in those terms. However, since I only finished Moby-Dick last August, it is fresh on my mind, so I’m going to use it as a springboard. In the first page of Blood Meridian we meet another orphan: the kid. The first sentence is, “See the child.” He’s actually not an orphan when we meet him, and in the first paragraph we get an interesting line about his heritage: “His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster.” The Biblical allusion to “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” a reference to the curse Joshua places upon the people Gibeah after they’ve beguiled the Israelites, hearkens violence of Biblical proportions as well as the curse that followed. It’s also suggestive of the profound issues McCarthy will be juggling through the book. Following the allusion, we meet the kid’s father briefly when he says,
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heaves. The Dipper stove.
We then learn little of the kid’s mother:
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it.
And then, just before another literary allusion, we learn this tragic fact about this young child:
He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a tastes for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
Again, the line “the child the father of the man” comes from a William Wordsworth poem, “My heart leaps up when I behold.” This poem speaks about a much more innocent theme: a child’s heart leaping when he sees a rainbow becomes the old man whose heart leaps when he sees the rainbow — so we hope. In Blood Meridian, what the child fathers is much more desolate.
And it is here, at the end of that first page, which is not very long, that we orphan the kid. At fourteen he runs away from home, never to return. On the next page he is shot, though not mortally wounded. And then there’s this beautiful sentence about his lost origins, which to me hearkens back to Ishmael’s concerns with the whiteness of the whale and with his own parentage:
His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
All of that incredibly deep setup in just a couple of pages, and I am sure I’ve left out much more. I’m afraid that that type of depth and that weighty dense prose is the nature of this book, but it pays much to the devoted reader. It’s violent — but it’s beautiful to behold.
In his paths through that wild and barbarous terrain there is one looming figure, his main antagonist, Judge Holden. How the kid first sees the judge is another part of the book that hearkens to Moby-Dick. In the first few pages of Moby-Dick, when Ishmael is wandering the streets thinking of his mortality, possibly contemplating suicide, he attends the sermon of Father Mapple and is in part invigorated into going to sea. In the first few pages of Blood Meridian, the kid attends a sermon by the Reverend Green. Suddenly, Judge Holden enters the room and claims Reverend Green is an impostor, that he has no degree of divinity, and in fact he is wanted by the law:
On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years — I said eleven — who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God.
Reverend Green’s only response: “This is him, cried the reverend, sobbing. This is him. The devil. Here he stands.” After Reverend Green has been killed by the congregation turned mob, Judge Holden is asked how he knew all of that about Reverend Green. His response is that he had never set eyes on the man before. Judge Holden is a brutal man, the embodiment of the loftiest philosophical conflicts found in Blood Meridian. He is, however, a kind of second to another man named John Joel Glanton, the leader of the filibusters. The Glanton Gang is a real gang of mercenaries hired by the Mexican government to protect civilians from the Apache Indians. They were paid by the scalp. And there is one reference in history to a Judge Holden, perhaps the most ruthless of the bunch. In Blood Meridian, Glanton leads the warfare; the judge leads the philosophizing and haunts the nights, eventually rising far above his role to the point where the story cannot contain him.
It is the kid’s misfortune to eventually become part of Glanton’s scalphunters. We witness massacres and, sometimes, the aftermath:
Long past dark that night when the moon was already up a party of women that had been upriver drying fish returned to the village and wandered howling through the ruins. A few fires still smoldered on the ground and dogs slank off from among the corpses. An old woman knelt at the blackened stones before her door and poked brush into the coals and blew back a flame from the ashes and began to right the overturned pots. All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon.
We also see the filibusters ride into a Mexican village, champions, saviors:
Hundreds of onlookers pressed about as the dried scalps were counted out upon the stones. Soldiers with muskets kept back the crowds and young girls watched the Americans with huge black eyes and boys crept forth to touch the grisly trophies. There were one hundred and twenty-eight scalps and eight heads and the governor’s lieutenant and his retinue came down into the courtyard to welcome them and admire their work. They were promised full payment in gold at the dinner to be held in their honor that evening at the Riddle and Stephens Hotel and with this the Americans sent up a cheer and mounted their horses again. Old women in black rebozos ran forth to kiss the hems of their reeking shirts and hold up their dark little hands in blessing and the riders wheeled their guanted mounts and pushed through the clamoring multitude and into the street.
The, well, rather: A terrible thing about it is that many of these scalps are the remnants of anything that even looked passably like an Indian scalp. So we have here the scalps of women and children, to be sure, but also of the Mexicans the filibusters were asked to keep safe. But, much like the whale and the search for the whale in Moby-Dick serves a greater philosophical narrative, the disgusting actions of the Glanton gang serve a similar purpose:
If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
It really is superb to watch the judge and the other characters and McCarthy discuss grand ideas. It is especially remarkable that the judge himself is a massive idea. In Blood Meridian the judge is, in some respects, more than just a member of the searchers. He is the white whale. Albino, large, incomprehensible, seemingly – or perhaps literally — immortal. More than a being of flesh and blood he, like Moby-Dick himself, is the bulging embodiment of bigger ideas.
To end this slight review, I’d like to change the focus from suggesting the big ideas to a quick look at McCarthy’s style. More than in his other books, Blood Meridian is written almost as if it were written in the 1850s or earlier. The word choice, the syntax, everything is archaic. But it is also poetic and fresh. Here, to end, are a few examples of his description of the loneliness or the violence encountered in the dessert surrounding the Texas – Mexico border in the 1850s (and today). The following sentences do not follow one another in the book, though the final two are from the same episode (and what an episode! where the kid has the judge in his sights three times while the judge, naked but with skins covering his nake head, calls to the kid while walking an idiot man on a lead).
There is hardly in the world a waste so barren but some creature will not cry out at night, yet here one was and they listened to their breathing in the dark and the cold and they listened to the systole of the rubymeated hearts that hung within them.
His leg had begun to bleed and he lay soaking it in the cold water and he drank and palmed water over the back of his neck. The marblings of blood that swung from his thigh were like thin red leeches in the current.
He looked at the expriest and at the slow gouts of blood dropping in the water like roseblooms how they swelled and were made pale.
I have now read five of McCarthy’s ten novels. I’ve loved each one, and each is masterful in its way — but this stands out as a masterpiece among masterworks.
I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book as disturbing as Cormac McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God (1973). It is my first venture to McCarthy pre-Blood Meridian (which I couldn’t finish at the time) when he was still writing about Tennessee. What surprised me most about this book, however, wasn’t necessarily how disturbing it was, though I certainly wasn’t prepared for that. No, what surprised me most was how absolutely wonderfully written it was. I guess I assumed, stupidly, that McCarthy had grown into his lyrical yet simple style, perfected in The Road. This book, however, shows that he had a gift for laconic depictions of depravity long ago.
Some people shouldn’t read this book. I’ll say it. Though not gratuitously graphic, in his exacting depictions of violence and degradation McCarthy drags the reader through the shocks. Right when you expect him to switch scenes and let us simply numbly imagine what is taking place, he keeps writing. And it’s so powerful, you stay around and watch (no wonder the Coen brothers connected with him so much — and I wonder if this book was where they got the idea of the wood chipper in Fargo – don’t worry: here the wood chipper is just a threat). This type of writing, so exact and able to pull at deeply rooted, hidden fears, is why I had to stop reading Blood Meridian — brilliant but I couldn’t tackle it at the time. While I believe sometimes such imagery is more powerful when done offstage, sometimes that is not the case. Much of this book is done offstage, but those parts that aren’t are importantly grotesque.
The subject character of this book is Lester Ballard, a type of villain that frightened me much more than Aton Chigur in No Country for Old Men and I think Ballard is, unfortunately, much more common. Here is how McCarthy introduces him:
To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps.
I’m not sure how to take that last sentence. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to find the humanity in Ballard (though Ballard is never excused or excused away by McCarthy) or if we’re supposed to find Ballard in the recesses of our own humanity. Probably it’s both at the same time, as might be suggested with this later exchange in the book:
You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.
But still, Ballard is different. In some way — we don’t fully apprehend the scope — Ballard is mentally deficient. Though people comfort themselves by passing him off as a harmless, small-sized idiot, they recognize that his deficiencies are made menacing because he packs around a rifle and because of his threatening sexuality which is visible in the way he ogles at the women and girls. Understandably, no one likes the vulgar Ballard and his attitude. He’s a loner who gets pushed farther and farther out at the periphery of this community that already had plenty of unseemly elements pushed out to the fringe, like moonshiners and like this tragic (but darkly comedic) family:
The dumpkeeper had spawned nine daughters and named them out of an old medical dictionary gleaned from the rubbish he picked. These gangling progeny with black hair hanging from their armpits now saw idle and wide-eyed day after day in chairs and crates about the little yard cleared out of the tips while their harried dam [sic] called them one by one to help with chores and one by one they shrugged or blinked their sluggard lids. Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue. They moved like cats and like cats in heat attracted surrounding swains to their midden until the old man used to go out at night and fire a shotgun at random just to clear the air.
When we meet him his home is being taken from him by the county. He ultimately ends up living in some caves away from the town.
The book presents Ballard from multiple perspectives. At times a third person close narrator is telling us about Ballard’s movements:
When he woke it was to agony. He sat up and gripped his feet. He howled aloud. With gingery steps he crossed the stone floor to the water and sat and put his feet in. The creek felt hot. He sat there soaking his feet and gibbering, a sound not quite crying that echoed from the walls of the grotto like the mutterings of a band of sympathetic apes.
At other times we get him from a group of men telling stories by the road. At others, it’s from someone deep in thought, reminiscing, like this one where we just heard about when the nine-year-old Ballard punched a boy named Finney in the nose:
The Finney boy just looked at Lester Ballard and went on up the road. I felt, I felt . . . I don’t know what it was. We just felt real bad. I never liked Lester Ballard from that day. I never liked him much before that. He never done nothin to me.
And then there are other times, and this is where this book seems particularly Melvillean, where the narrator, whoever it is at this point, discusses with the reader the horror of what we’re witnessing together:
He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could now swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has people the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man’s life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could now swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has people the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man’s life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?
Again, is it a mercy to Ballard or to humanity that he drown? And again, that’s a false dichotomy. While McCarthy never suggests that Ballard is excused by his psychology or his past, I found the key to be that in the moment Ballard starts his steep descent into depravity he is most recognizable to us — as us. It’s a small moment brought about not by Ballard but by dumb luck, and Ballard has a choice to make. It takes him an excruciatingly long time to make the choice, and all the while we’re begging him to walk away, just walk away. He keeps stepping away and then stepping back for just a little bit more, and then the prescient words of the smith ring true: “It’s like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye’d just as well to do it all wrong.”
So, after moving straight to the top of my most disturbing book of the year if not of all time, I can look around the ugliness of the subject and see the power and the importance of the discussion. Some of you shouldn’t read this book — but you won’t be sorry if you do.
In anticipation of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, I thought it might be nice to look a few past winners (by the way, don’t miss out on the opportunity to win a $75 gift certificate for books from KevinfromCanada by picking this year’s Pulitzer).
I first read The Road (2006; Pulitzer) shortly after it came out and shortly after my first son was born. It struck me so profoundly that on the day the Pulitzer Prize was announced I was in such a state of anxiety that one would have thought I had written the book. Honestly, I don’t care who wins the Pulitzer, but that year I wanted it to win. It won, I think, against the odds (it had <warning: potentially alienating bias> already been nabbed by Oprah). I know that some of the reason this book touched me so much was because I was (I still am) very touched and overcome by my relationship with my son (sons now). It’s something I never expected and cannot explain. Yet somehow, in a bleak—some say depressing—postapoalyptic novel, McCarthy communicated a father-son relationship incredibly well. No doubt McCarthy’s relationship with his recently born son informed his writing. This review might seem heavy on that perspective, so I’m interested in how others responded to this book.
In the first sentence, McCarthy shows the father-son relationship:
When he awoke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath.
That was not sentimental. That was not sentimental. It’s what I still do every night. And I’m not living on the side of a road in the cold. I also like this opener because with such conciseness we get a sense for the repetitious passage of time. The verb tense shows that this is not one particular night but rather any number of nights, perhaps every night, for a while now.
The world is gray, and ash falls in the place of snow. Something awful has happened—what, we’re never told, and it doesn’t matter because that’s not the point. We have few details, but we know that it happened shortly after the son was born, so this son knows no other world. The father and son have been travelling because the father knows they could not survive another winter where they were. So they set off south across the United States and apparently into Mexico, looking for the sea, using the road, hoping to make it to a warmer climate.
The father sees little hope in the world. He has lost faith. Though they are travelling to a warmer climate, he has no idea what they will find there, if anything, and he knows they could die in any number of ways during their course. However, he maintains a pretense for the son, who is trusting and good natured. His son’s demeanor is dangerous, actually, since the son often wants to help those they meet on the road. The father would sooner have nothing to do with others; he’s seen what could happen. I found the father’s pretenses to be particularly touching and insightful. Despite his own lack of hope, he wants his son to have it. Somehow, this expresses a deep, desperate faith in humanity that the father can’t help but cling too for his son’s sake—it would be too painful otherwise.
That the father has lost hope and faith is completely understandable, however. Though not nearly as violent as McCarthy’s magnum opus Blood Meridian (I haven’t yet managed to get through Blood Meridian, in fact, because of the violence, though I found it brilliant), The Road is still a violent book. And as in Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, the violence is sudden and McCarthy is almost as disinterested and descriptive as a detailed crime report, not romanticizing violence by any means, but not shying away from a matter-of-fact description, say, <warning: violent image> of a beheaded infant roasting on a spit. It is this world the father sees all around him, and it is difficult for him to reconcile the ugliness of this world with the beauty he sees in his son. How can the two coexist?
And what is the point? Why seek to perpetuate existence in such a world? The father knows that the son’s fate is potentially going to be worse than death. That’s why he carries a pistol with two bullets, one for his son and one for him should they be captured by the marauding cannibals. If brought to that point, could he do it?
I think McCarthy’s prose style, which I admire greatly, found its best substance here. Always laconic, always complex while seeming simple, here the form fits its function: it mimics existence in an intense but mundane thousand mile walk on a road. The book is broken up into many small sections, each running for half a page to a few pages at most. Again, I think this form mimics the tension they feel and what must have been a fairly laconic, bare essentials existence.
Yet in all of this simpleness, there is a layer of complexity and linguistic virtuosity. Though he most often uses blunt Anglo-Saxon words (which, again, I find fitting in this book), he’s the type of writer you should read to study for the verbal section of the GRE. Here are a few: granitic, collet, chifforobe, discalced, macadam, woad, tang (of a shovel), bolus, knurled, isocline, patteran). McCarthy also knows how to use ordinary words in new, but obvious ways (even James Wood said McCarthy was almost Shakespearean in his capacity to use old words in new ways. For example, when using a pair of binoculars, the father “glasses” the land (could be new just to me). And in the next paragraph, sands are coagulate and a fire is feral.
They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.
I also like the above passage because it shows the almost pre-civilization view of the world and the gods. There are several eerie places where one gets the sense that this is a ravaged world ruled by gods more like ghosts, haunting but almost not there. This paragraph also contains another of McCarthy’s references to a W.B. Yeats poem. Assuming, as I’m sure he does, McCarthy knows Yeats’s philosophies—what all the gyres mean—and used some of it in structuring this book, it is a fascinatingly ambiguous venture into hope and despair.
As the National Book Award longlist is being announced today, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight one of my favorite past winners: Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992). I have still read only two other books by McCarthy: The Road and No Country for Old Men. I have started and stopped Blood Meridian, considered by many to be his masterpiece and one of the great American novels, because I haven’t found a way to get over the violence in that book. I read from Harold Bloom that he had the same problem, but that it is one of his favorites. However, from what I’ve read, though I enjoyed The Road immensely, I think my favorite must be this one.
Here is the first beautiful paragraph, a great place to start the review, I think:
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm was pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed mustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.
Introduced above is sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole and his dead maternal grandfather, the last of the Grady line, which is also “dimly” introduced. With this death, John is basically dispossessed of the ranch because his mother has left to join a theater and his father has nothing to do with the place. Not really knowing where to go or what to do, he takes off with his best friend Lacey Rawlins to cross from Texas to Mexico.
Thus, All the Pretty Horses becomes one of the great “wanderer” books, where the character and the plot goes from place to place, from person to person, deepening on a philosophical level all the while. On the way to Mexico, John and Rawlins meet with Jimmy Blevins, a fourteen-year-old sharpshooter, who speaks like a man, but we know better. Strangely, that is one of the most profound parts of the book for me: these three children have believable conversations about life and death and love. Somehow what they say sounds more reliable and genuine than what I read in other books from more mature characters.
Some of this depth is definitely due to McCarthy’s prose. I’m not usually a fan of long running sentences because it usually feels like the writer is calling attention to himself rather than to the character. But when it’s done with skill it is powerful, deepening the texture of the story. The following passage illuminates the contrasting style and texture in two consecutive paragraphs.
That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers our of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their mains and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.
In the morning two guards came and opened the door and handcuffed Rawlins and led him away. John Grady stood and asked where they were taking him but they didnt answer. Rawlins didnt even look back.
Along the way around the novel, John Grady Cole falls in love with the daughter of a rich Mexican rancher. Where some authors would perhaps center the novel around this event, McCarthy presents it as an important event that resonates with John through the rest of the book but that doesn’t become McCarthy’s focus as well. However, the encounters are excellently construed and resonate with the reader as well. Here’s another chance to show off a bit of McCarthy’s interesting prose. Once again, I can only say that the stylistic tricks don’t feel like tricks to me but rather serve to give the book texture that is rare today, though many try:
She paused midway to look back. Standing there trembling in the water and not from the cold for there was none. Do not speak to her. Do not call. When she reached him he held out his hand and she took it. She was so pale in the lake she seemed to be burning. Like foxfire in a darkened wood. That burned cold. Like the moon that burned cold. Her black hair floating on the water about her, falling and floating on the water. She put her other arm about his shoulder and looked toward the moon in the west do not speak to her do not call and then she turned her face up to him.
One of the many fascinating aspects of the book that I want to mention is that the story takes place in 1949, which hardly seems possible given the setting and the violence which tempted me to place the story much earlier in, say, the 1860s. However, from what I’ve heard, the setting and events is not anachronistic, making this book quite a learning experience for me, bringing the old American West with its violence and life much closer to home. That said, one shouldn’t shy away from this book because it is a Western. It is a great piece of literature that just happens to take place in a setting similar to any American Western. The true pearls in the text are how McCarthy uses this setting to ruminate on deeper, universal themes.
On another note, this book is the first of the “Border Trilogy” and you can see in the first paragraph of this review that I haven’t read the other two, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. Nor do I have a strong desire to read them just yet. To me All the Pretty Horses was complete. Sure, I’m interested to know where the young man goes next, but for now I’m enjoying the idea that his wanderings continue. It’s hard to imagine it getting better.
You may have gleened from the pulled quotes above that this is not the type of book that would have impressed this year’s judges for the Booker Prize. After all, I had to read the first paragraph several times before I knew what was going on, and even then I still had no idea who “he” was for quite a while. McCarthy doesn’t use much puncuation, instead relying on his experience as a master revisionist to help him get sentences to the point where they don’t need punctuation to be understandable. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. That doesn’t mean it’s accessible to those who are just looking to breeze through a book. But the work pays off, as it always does with the best pieces of literature. We see that a master craftsman carefully weighed his or her options when deciding how to piece together a book in such a way to affect a thoughtful reader. And believe it or not, because the prose is still so natural, when one gets into the story it flows smoothly.
Here’s hoping that the National Book Award can find and honor such a book again this year.
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