Cormac McCarthy, who died on Tuesday aged 89, achieved fame relatively late. He was nearly 60 when, in 1992, his sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses, brought him mainstream attention. The book was a bestselling award-winner and it was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), to form The Border Trilogy.
No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) sold well and won awards too, the latter landing a Pulitzer. Both became hit films, made by the Coen brothers and John Hillcoat respectively. Then, after a 16-year long silence, McCarthy’s final books arrived in 2022: The Passenger and Stella Maris. The paired novels met with mixed reactions, particularly the austere Stella Maris, a book-length conversation between a suicidal mathematical prodigy and her therapist. Reviewers wondered at McCarthy’s attempt to write a female lead; McCarthy wrote about men, mostly. But in Stella Maris there were flashes of his classic style too, of his mordant wit and stark description.
The Passenger also echoed his previous works. Parts seemed to recall No Country for Old Men, not least the opening scene of a diver in the Gulf of Mexico discovering a sunken plane, “the faces of the dead inches away. Everything that could float was against the ceiling. Pencils, cushions, styrofoam coffeecups. Sheets of paper with the ink draining off into hieroglyphic smears.” Other parts read like a return to Suttree, McCarthy’s epic of drifters in Knoxville, afloat on the Tennessee River, sludgy with catfish, or living precariously on its banks in a near-Joycean world of outcasts, petty criminals and profuse literary allusion.
Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, War and other classics of modern reportage, once told me Suttree was McCarthy’s “most brilliant novel, because it’s just his most mundane”. It didn’t show the reader the 1840s Texas of Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s “stunning” 1985 western, Junger said. Nor was Suttree like The Road, “apocalyptic and whatever, all big dramatic stuff. Suttree takes place in Knoxville in fucking nothingness, and it’s the most brilliant writing. It’s insane. He’s so good.”
I confessed: for all my raving about McCarthy, and echoes I found in Junger’s work, I had not read Suttree.
“Are you fucking kidding?” Junger said. “You have to read Suttree.”
I took his advice, went to the Strand on my way to the subway. He was right.
Cornelius Suttree drifts through rusted rail yards, dive bars and diners. Not much plot happens over nearly 500 pages but everything is pungently hyperreal. McCarthy achieves a vast tapestry of anger, humour, violence, kindness, bad behaviour and basic decency. Suttree may be McCarthy’s most sympathetic book but it’s still very male. Just like his darker works, you don’t read it as much as live it; emerging, you wonder if you dreamed it.
His breakthrough novel, All the Pretty Horses, was perhaps his most conventional. But “although its subject and approach are superficially more palatable” than those of McCarthy’s previous books, the New York Times said on release, “the essence of his unusual vision also persists”.
Two young Texans go to Mexico to work with horses. An affair ends badly. Native Americans are present, but not central. The sense of an ancient wilderness from which the Americas were carved and to which they will return is palpable on each page. In the second and third books of the trilogy, McCarthy’s vision darkens, his style fragments, the reader must work ever harder. What the Times reviewer contended would in lesser hands have become “a combination of Lonesome Dove and Huckleberry Finn” becomes instead a kind of modern Faulkner. Faulkner said “the past is never dead, it’s not even past”; McCarthy writes a terrible, perpetual present.
In The Road, the story of a father and son’s fight for survival in a blasted landscape after an unspecified environmental catastrophe, is grim, relentless and often hard to stomach. An all-too-plausible picture of a society destroyed by its own appetite, its antecedents are there in previous books, from the deranged hillbilly in Child of God to the ever-harsher terrain of The Border Trilogy and the seething horror of Blood Meridian. The Road ends on a note of hope – a faint one, though.
No Country for Old Men came next. The Coen brothers’ film may have superseded the book in the popular imagination, as successful films do, but readers are unlikely to be disappointed whether they come to the novel before or after the movie. The Coens took most of it straight from McCarthy’s pages. Anton Chigurh, the hitman ultimately played by Javier Bardem, is a descendant of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian: implacable, terrifying, Death on his white horse assuming outlandish human form. McCarthy concentrates on simple, relentless fate. Like the west Texas landscape in which the drug deal gone awry plays out, the book has terrible beauty. It helps that it also rips along like a thriller.
So does Blood Meridian, for my money McCarthy’s greatest novel but more than that – the greatest modern novel, the true successor or companion to Moby-Dick, a book in which McCarthy pursues themes with which Herman Melville wrestled but places his tale in the open west, rather than at sea.
In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches the peak of his style: spare and ornate at once, repetitious but endlessly readable. The violence is appalling, as violence is. White men wreak terror. Native Americans fight back. Through the maniacally eloquent Judge, McCarthy contends a stark truth: that violence is what men will always pursue. That violence is what America was born from and will not escape. Every time there is a school shooting, I think of McCarthy’s tree, hung with the bodies of dead infants.
In the end, McCarthy’s elemental brilliance lies in perhaps the most famous lines in Blood Meridian: “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
